


The Golden Spiral

by TheBibleSalesman



Series: Pieces [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Dorado (Overwatch), Gen, Omnic Crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22073254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBibleSalesman/pseuds/TheBibleSalesman
Summary: - Dorado, 25 years before Recall -Commander Gabriel Reyes leads the UN's elite "Overwatch" unit to the coast of Mexico, where they aim to destroy the omnium responsible for La Medianoche.
Relationships: Ana Amari/Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Series: Pieces [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1588816
Kudos: 5





	1. Noche de los Angelitos

Death chased the omnic into the alley between the panadería and the shoemaker. Here lichens spatter purple in the eyes of stone nuns crowned by flowers, and thread gold through the teeth of feathered snakes. Rainbow trails of cobblestones fall away from her feet.

Death. Cessation-of-process. Would it recycle her? Would it gather her up in its six watery arms? She could see its red eyes when she looked across the rags wrapping her shoulder. Would her materials be reconfigured into another omnic? If so, would that omnic be her? She burst from the alley. On her left, the flower shop where she once worked. Her reflection shrinks across the marigolds wilting in the window. Hanging patches where her apron had been. The bitter tongue of frayed leather looping her striped sackcloth trousers. The white ghost of toquilla straw sailing on her head. Cessation-of-process.

Ahead of her sprouted the centuries-old face of the misión, three stories at the edge of the jungle. Flea market tents cluster around the stair to the front door, all empty now, and one aflame. Rock ferns, rock buntings, rock saints with arquebuses dangling from their pearly hands, looking down from the walls; she could not imagine one century, let alone the many the misión had lived. But maybe if she avoided cessation-of-process, it could be her standing ancient and oblique against the magenta fires filling the sky.

Her foot crashed on the lip of a brick jutting off the step to the misión entry, and her body lurched with sudden, decomposited weight. She stretched forth her arms and clutched the doorframe, knocking her faceplate on one of the empty brass hinges.

On Tuesdays and Fridays the priest invited mariachi bands to play the cloister, to leverage the stone ribs around the garden in amplifying the discord of their trumpets. They rattled the window that kept her inside the flower shop, they were so loud. They grew with her, shocking her with the vibes of electric guitars, rolling by the window with an organ on wheels. Melding with the John Legend on the tablet by the register-- _Celebrar tú nombre, y salir contigo disfrazado de horizonte._

Piano keys twirled through her sensors as she lay against the door, teeth without a mouth, stones reemerging from the river they had been dashed into. She raised her head. No teacup-and-flower dresses spinning in the garden, no spangled trumpets among the broad black leaves. God’s music rose now from beneath the church, under her feet.

A fat blue lizard with a tail of long sunset shifted its face at her from above the door hinge. The living, organic movement drew her sensory focus in turn, and the sight of the magnificent reptile prompted a scream. She never generated a noise, the feeling never made it past the webs in her CPU; she just hurtled silently within her own head. Her fingers contracted so hard they crushed silhouettes into the doorframe and she pushed herself upright, then ran inside the garden.

She ferreted through the radiating leaves to the navel of the cloister court, where a dry fountain painted a backdrop for bands no longer playing, where the circle of benches for listeners now held only one bloated blue corpse. Divine punishment maybe, for repurposing the cloister to a public space. She slowed as she came up on the resting priest, and picked a circle of wild buds from her apron pocket.

Two weeks ago, the priest announced that his medicine had run out. She asked him the chemical composition. She had a vast database of flowers, and from her work she knew some were used in medicine. If she knew the molecular arrangement, she could possibly cobble together a replacement from the catalog in the shop. But what he told her was: he did not know any of the ingredients. Something so vital to him, and he knew nothing of how it worked. It was like a faith in sorcery.

But he said _Thank you for thinking of me, my dear child._ And she saw him saying it now again, through his smiling mouth full of flies. She laid the flower buds on his chest.

“Padre,” she called, to rouse him from Death. Maybe it would return him-- it was human too, after all --or maybe he could fight back through its endless waters.

The corpse did not move. But at the back of the garden a bright red tentacle cracked away from the palm leaf it had been coiling against. The omnic clapped her hands over her mouthseam, jerked herself back from the fountain, and hid behind a tree. She had these preprogrammed lifelike nuances, always of more emotive value than logical. When her aquamarine painted metal peeked around the rings of bark, the shadow at the back of the cloister was gone. There was only the palm plant swaying in the windless fryer of the night air.

Why was _it_ here now? Had enough lights finally gone out that it felt comfortable dragging itself out of the jungle onto the bare misión rock? How did she know, instantly, that it came from under the church? She had never seen it before. But she recalled how she had stood by the pond out back, gazing into the treeline, and it was ever on the edge of her imagination. Like sleep, like a dream. Why did she fear it, even when Death was rushing to her side?

Her head bobbled out to check for more anomalous movements among the slowly dying plants. Finding nothing, she waded through a planter of briefly vivid, multicolored cornstalks on her way to the orange galleries bordering the garden. A meaty purple warhead had punched an eye through the wall. It lay on its side, inert only by guess, and propped the adobe at an unnatural angle from the gallery floor. Wet soil mealed endlessly beneath the misión’s outward sturdiness. The shallow cave should have smelled of mushrooms that pimpled its outskirts, but whenever the omnic saw that orange paint she always ventilated the fruit instead. Oranges haunted her, like there were leaking pieces juicing the band of her hat.

She knocked down onto bent legs outside the cave, scraping another few threads from the holes at her trouser knees.

“Come out, Olivia.” She unpinned a small pebbled body from the leather tape of her belt, and again she wanted to cry. “I caught another lizard for you.” She wanted to scream, to tell Olivia of what had been sacrificed even without words. She had seen humans wailing and screaming at the church. Later she would give them marigolds, and they would laugh and tear them to pieces. Wail and scream, dance and sing. Inside herself she assigned the responses to appropriate feeling-concepts, but she had never been able to test those protocols. What she felt, she wanted Olivia to know. “Won’t you come out, just this once, while I am still here?”

Three weeks ago she stood in the window of the flower shop waiting for customers. None had rung their way through the door in months. The neon red _ABIERTO_ sign in the window no longer came on at night. She made arrangements of every flower in the shop, even ones in the preservers that the owner had not assigned to her. She dug through the trash for discarded stems and bent them as well, fashioned of them divine circles and small yellow wings.

Bells of Ireland, those were her favorites. She could make hands and arms and lush green omnic skeletons out of them. Humans never knew she was making omnics and not just dead things. Bells of Ireland weren’t from Ireland though. They were native to Turkey. She made sure to tell customers, because her programming said they would respond well to a clever fact. Some didn’t. Broke the romance, they said, to know the truth. Others called her stupid, because turkeys don’t hatch out plants.

She stood in the window and saw Padre and Olivia creeping from the church on a supply run. Padre told her later that he brought Olivia because she was the smartest of all the children. She knew not to make sounds that might rouse those under the church. When Olivia spotted the omnic standing in the window, she used her hands to alert Padre.

Padre waved her out from behind the glass, and she left her backdrop of irises to join them. Olivia had not been happy. The next day, the omnic crossed up the alley. She tried convincing the omnics in the ice cream truck-- with their pastel pink uniforms still mint condition and their ice cream buckets empty of all but melted, fly-bitten residue --to accept the church sanctuary. But they continued to stand behind their registers, or sometimes swept outside the truck, cobblestones that nobody had been stepping on. When the army dozed through on their Bastion hunts a couple days after Padre died, those omnics were cessation-of-process.

How it hurt to be individual. It was so lonely. She pressed her forehead to the broken rock and the toquilla slipped off her indicator lights, her long backcurved antennae trembling wide over her shoulders without the hat to train their place. How she lit up inside, unspeakably, when Olivia’s small hand reached out into hers to snatch the lizard. Olivia tore off the tail and returned the rest to the omnic, a runner of blood coughing down the side of the omnic’s hand.

“I must tell you, Olivia: Death saw me when I went hunting,” the omnic said. Olivia’s small hands slowed in the dark beneath the lopsided wall. Her eyes fixed on the omnic’s slots. “And just now, when I visited Padre, an emissary from beneath the church was waiting in the garden. I feel they are closing in. They are in all the doors.” Olivia dropped the tail she had been skinning with her dirty nails and flattened to the back of the cave.

Olivia’s response of choice was always to hide. She reminded the omnic of the lizard, when it had been alive. She pulled its remains closer, back into the moonlight. It lay upside-down, showing the stripes on its belly, its eyes half-screened by little white masks. Dots of red did a zapateado around its jaw.

But her memory saw it alive and whole again, cocking its lapis lazuli head, mopping up ants with curtain swipes of its fresh pink tongue. When the shadow of her hand came down it curled around itself. And it was here again now with her, sitting up from her hand, bulging the points of its tongue from its lips. “Do you think the world is ending?” she asked Olivia. “If it is, why were we born into it?”

“You weren’t born.” Olivia’s voice sounded like the darkness she lived in. “You were made in a factory, just like them.” She pointed down, under the soil, under the church, to where the mariachi still played. “You’re going crazy just like they did. You’re a bad robot!”

There was a time when it would have been the height of insult. She would have fallen on her knees in prostrations, apologies.

“I am not crazy.” Her hand turned over and gnarled into the moldy dirt to rest the lizard beside a pile of its decomposing peers. “This is just my first time to feel this way. My first…” She wrapped her arms around her chassis, and briefly felt the appeal of Olivia’s preferred defense. “Padre would know what to say, but he is no longer here. I feel I must turn to those under the church. Olivia, did you know there is music…?”

Olivia popped forward, just pieces of herself in the moonlight. Pink t-shirt splattered in mud, jean shorts ragged like the omnic’s trousers. She no longer wore the light-up sneakers she had when they first met, and her white socks were patched in red along the bottom.

“Just hide!” she demanded. She looked strangely like an omnic trapped in an unbecoming sack of skin.

“There is no time,” the omnic thought aloud, and inside herself she thought that time was not real, for the lizards piled at the cave entrance were alive and scattering under her eyes, away from Olivia’s gnawed pink hands. “Death is coming. Perhaps I should give you to it, before I depart. It is your kind. It has your face. Maybe it has functions beyond cessation-of-process. Humans are flexible.”

“Please don’t go,” Olivia moaned.

“I am scared, Olivia.” She put her hands over Olivia’s head, running down her black hair, getting caught in the tangles. Like mothers to daughters, though Olivia was her elder by a year. “I am not strong enough to stay in one place forever. I am a runner. Like El-ahrairah.” Her antennae bobbed up in brief irony. “If the ones down there end up being better than Death, I will tell them to leave you alone forever. I will tell them for you Olivia, I promise.” Promises, like time and luck, were not things she readily understood. They were concepts, bell knots of programming, to be felt through like a maze.

Death swept into the church. It wore a blue robe. It carried rifles and shotguns and grenades and knives. The shadow of its wings unfolded up the walls. A rickety sound like an opening bag of teeth flowed up the garden steps to the fountain at the center. “I am sorry I only met you now,” the omnic told Olivia. “At the end of the world.”

Death’s red eyes shot after the sound of the omnic’s voice. Bullets tore out of its harshly cut silhouette, chopping off fingers, slamming holes through her circular shoulders, searing the rock in front of Olivia and setting her screaming. She was the smartest of the children, but fear could overturn good decision-making. The omnic understood that now.

She got to her feet and ran out the back, leaving threads of black oil across the misión.

The gate in the valley was the only path left to her.

* * *

Jack Morrison, a soldier, advanced on the white halo of a flat-topped toquilla abandoned by a broken gallery wall. Red targeting holograms floated on his visor piece, though the mission objective had floated off north. He wasn’t worried about tracking the wounded omnic just yet.

When he fired the rifle, he saw the omnic, but heard something human in the same place, echoing through the rubble. Couching the rifle against his left side and bracing his glove on the faded plaster, he ducked to look in the old missile wedge.

His blue eyes rounded. He switched off the auto-targeting system and laid the rifle down, then stuck his hand into the shadows. The girl in the dark shrank back from him, crying. Jack mushed a couple fingers on his earpiece.

“Gaaabe…” he warbled into the radio.

“ _Stay quiet, Morrison,_ ” the line cut back at him. “ _We’re coming._ ”


	2. Mission Church

“You got too far ahead again.” Another blue coat joined Jack’s at the edge of the darkness. Gabriel Reyes, the Commander, closed his hand firm on Jack’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”

Jack paced the sharp square of his chin through a couple sheepish nods before pointing it at the crevice by their feet. Gabriel got down on one knee, resting the long black body of a shotgun in the mud. His self-assured smirk framed by his carefully landscaped beard faltered as his eyes moved across the crevice edge, the piles of dead lizards fertilizing puffball mushrooms. When he hunched to look inside, the curve of his mouth evaporated. He gunned a couple fingers at his earpiece.

“Ana…” His voice emerged a little wheedling. He cleared his throat. “You have an all-clear on the cloister, Amari?”

“ _For now,_ ” came the instant cool crackle through the earpiece.

“Join us down here for a sec?”

A third pair of boots landed beside the first two, a third blue coat swimming down into gravity’s hold. Ana squatted at Gabriel’s other flank and shooed the toquilla hat out of the way, then checked the shadows beyond. Her eyebrows swooped up to the resting blue line of her beret.

“Get out of there. You’re wasting our time.” Her arm lanced into the crevice, shoving the ant-covered detritus out of the way to reach the girl. When the girl yelled and all the better mimicked a flatworm hiding from a microscope light, Ana sighed through her teeth and took off her beret. She scooped her grassy black hair to one side before attempting to squeeze under the rock wall. Gabriel climbed to his feet to join Jack in watching the surroundings, guns-up.

“There aren’t supposed to be any humans left this close to it.” Jack’s bluestone eyes searched Gabriel’s face.

“I realize this isn’t something you can resolve by shooting your gun at it,” Gabriel said, keeping his eyes on the silhouetted stillness of the cloister garden. “But you don’t need to make it into a problem.” Jack noticed his vigilance and turned into a copy. Gabriel relaxed. He didn’t know if his ease was from the resumption of duty, or because Jack was so spooked in the first place. Of course a kid would make Jack nervous. Shake the unshakeable. He wore a small smile, but it should have been laughter.

He was still thinking about the eyes: purple, like the girl in the cave was a girl from the heart of a star. The eyes of a meteor. _Alien_ maybe was the word, but he kept thinking of the quilt his father made when he was a kid: interlocking galaxies of dark triangles stretching across his bed, somewhere between disco and the universe. Quilts, tire swings, orange trees, Orange County. All that good homey stuff, but then, as eyes do, looking beyond it.

“That thing is getting away,” Jack pointed out.

“It’s just a civ.”

“It killed a priest.” Jack seesawed the butt of his rifle at the benches worshipping the garden fountain. Gabriel obligingly lingered on the old man in a dark robe strung out atop one of them, his mouth a wriggling black soup pot.

“Maybe,” he allowed. The omnic did run straight for the mission objective when they first spotted it. It was entirely possible for the enemy to conscript civs. “Think that’s our priest? The one with the seismograph?”

“God…” Jack’s tone suggested he only just now recalled the intel source. “I hope not.”

Gabriel thought it was. Not many priests set up ham radios to get around infrastructure blocks and rang on the same frequency for weeks _Help, help, there’s an illegally expanded omnium under my church._ But they would run ID after. Not him, or Jack, or anyone on their team. But somebody. Probably in a hazard suit.

There were supposed to be more kids here, he thought.

A blocky shadow invaded the church’s front door. Jack and Gabriel’s heads twisted towards it, but the mouths of their guns dropped. It was a familiar shape: bare-chinned, but with muttonchops maning out from the sides of heavy cheekbones. Torbjörn Lindholm, an engineer. Oil stains leaked under his blue shoulder plates, like he too was a part in a machine.

“Nice to see you catch up,” Gabriel greeted.

“Repairs are complete,” Lindholm reported dimly, like an omnic. “Wilhelm will be along once they finish the checks.”

“Or before that, if they activate the propulsion system first again,” Ana puffed as she cracked her back straight and withdrew from the crevice empty-handed, bangs crinkled down the symmetric window of her face. Lindholm squinted over his bulbous nose at the three of them as Ana wiped a pat of mud off her cheek.

“Take Jack,” Gabriel ordered. Lindholm trundled up, standing stiffly beside them, though not exactly at attention. “He’s hunting an omnic that ran through here.” He wagged a shotgun at the oil trail streaming away from the crevice. Lindholm’s face congealed at last, to fiery anger.

“With pleasure.”

“If it leads you to the backdoor, great. Report any discoveries and we’ll make a gameplan.” Gabriel glanced at Jack. “Try to avoid an engagement until we’re all there.”

Jack hooped his shoulders in big heavy rotations, nodding, steeling himself. He set off at a sedate pace down the shadowy gallery, staying even with Lindholm.

“I should go with Jack,” Ana insisted the moment the advance fireteam trickled from earshot behind an unfinished mural of an omnic farmer overlooking an orange grove. She jutted two fingers at the ceiling. “I saw a perfect location on the roof for spotting that jungle. You know they’re not going to have it anywhere open. It’s going to be past the treeline.”

“Patience,” Gabriel warned. “Lindholm is a heavy enough collar for now.”

“Lindholm can’t protect him.”

“You can protect me for a sec.” Gabriel turned around and gathered Ana’s beret, offering it to her. “Right?” She stood up, smoothing the hair out of her eyes and pinning it in place with the beret. They smiled at each other and she set up the fencing saber of her long-gun. She flicked a gearing on the tripod that would give the thin barrel a bit of swivel. Gabriel set his weapons down on some old monk’s stone divan.

“You won’t fit. Don’t try,” Ana grumbled at her sights as he peeked under the wall again. “Don’t know what you’re going to do, aside from lifting it off her.”

“Tempting.” Gabriel sat back from the fifteen-foot chunk of stone and orange paint. He could feel the omnium under his boots, a constant vibration, peaks in a seismograph. Entrance had to be in the deepest part of the valley, then a back-tunnel folding into the foundation. Did Omnica ratchet the design out of the allotted zone, or the oligarchian conglomerate that purchased their product? There was a graveyard out back, it was sacrilegious. Did the machines adjust the architecture themselves? _Self-improving algorithms._ “Think I can do it?” He grinned up at Ana. She didn’t honor the hypothesis with an answer. Gabriel drew his hand across the dusty floor in front of the crevice, and came up with a bullet. “Jack discharged his weapon.”

“I saw.”

“He’s right. There shouldn’t be anyone left.” Gabriel stared at a vomit stain filled with marigold petals. “Just take the kids and run next time…” He negotiated through his belt packs for a protein bar: almond butter and grass-fed whey. Not UN issue. Santa Monica Farmers Market. He went for that over the granola, because the whipped mass of simple ingredients was soft, a little melty from the low end of the hemisphere, easy on any mouth.

He undid one end of the green wrapper and got down on both knees. Balanced the bar in his hand just above the crescent of mushrooms. He didn’t bother getting his face low to leer a reaction. He just waited.

After a minute he heard Ana exhale through a slit in her lips. She probably wanted to say something and caught herself.

A couple tiny hands crawled out of the dark and feathered up his curled fingers to the exposed grain of the bar. They broke off the top chunk and immediately zipped back under the rock. Gabriel slipped his little finger against the bottom of the bar and propped the next section into view at the top. Silence for a while. He started wondering about undisclosed nut allergies.

The child’s hands came out again. He relaxed his finger and the bar sagged down in the wrapper, below the waterline of his fist. She pried at the circle of his glove. “I’m not letting go,” he chuckled. The hands sank out of view.

They came back with a sharp triangular rock and struck his coiled joints, prying the oyster. “Ow!” he laughed.

“What are you doing?” Ana asked.

“Shh.” He dragged his arm a few inches further from the shadows. The hands thrust out after him empty and hungry. She clawed onto his glove. When he felt the latch on the dark blue forearm of his coat, he stood and lifted and out came the girl in the wall. She automatically hugged her knees around his sides. He automatically swung his free arm under her weight, balancing her.

He released the protein bar. “Here.” The girl smacked it into her face, holding it against her lips, wrapper crinkling grotesquely. Gabriel turned to show his prize to Ana. “Think I’m ready for that _Time_ cover now?”

Ana’s glance was meant to take split-second stock: of Gabriel, grinning, and the girl with filthy hair, spit and grains smearing her face, lines of ants crossing from her arms and legs onto his uniform.

The wedjat beneath her eye rumpled and her hand lifted from the rifle to brush at the chewing trains of insects. She pulled the girl’s shaggy hair back from her eyes, one of the girl’s cheeks stung out by an infected bruise.

“They would never put a soldier on the cover.” Ana took a cloth off her belt and watered it with her canteen.

“They did. In 2003. They called it ‘the American Soldier’. And in the cover story the only guys they named were the Defense Secretary, the President, and Saddam Hussein.” Gabriel transitioned to watching the garden in Ana’s stead.

Ana ran the cloth over the welts chained down the girl’s knees and the scratches on the backs of her hands. She bit her lip as she peeled back the edges of socks crusted on the girl’s feet, gently wiping the puffy pink anklets scored underneath. Without really looking, Gabriel unsnapped his med pouch and tweezed out a roll of bandages. “Are we the adults in this situation, Amari?” he whispered as her hand crossed his to retrieve the aloe-laced cloth. In his peripheral he saw her amber eyes rise to his face, then back down.

“La samah Allah,” she muttered, and he was grinning again.

The girl in his arms hiccupped and dropped the empty wrapper on the ground. Gabriel bent to pick it up and stuff it in one of his bags. When he lifted himself straight the girl was pawing around his uniform.

He clucked his tongue, and when the girl zeroed on the sound, he directed her with a flick of his eyes to a pocket on his left armband. He heard her undo the zipper, then the tinsel of another ravaged protein bar. Ana switched to outward surveillance and he returned to the marveling, the exchange of modes between them smooth and unspoken.

He shifted the girl’s weight up his hip using a practiced methodology, freeing a hand to hold the side of her jaw and slow down her consumption of the second bar. Her eyebrows knit a rash of annoyance at him. His heart trundled around in his chest, stirred by memories. His father’s quilt was on a different small bed now.

“Her eyes,” he cooed to Ana.

“The nanite concentration must be really high here,” Ana agreed. “Not that we expected any different.”

“But then she must have been here for a long time, and nothing’s come to take her.”

“What are we going to do?” Ana so rarely removed her talented eye from the mission.

“Well when Reinhardt gets here, he can take her back to camp. He’d be fastest.”

“We _need_ Reinhardt.”

“All we need is the three of us.” Gabriel re-seated the girl against his hip. She wasn’t downright bony, but wore the gray cast of malnourishment. Missing her macro targets by a country mile.

The movement, the resettling, inspired a new reaction out of her, interest beyond comatose digestion of her two most recent feasts. Her little hands went up and grasped his face, pinching his nose, pulling his mustache. “Hi,” he offered, and she blinked unsteadily up, like she hadn’t guessed there was a soul attached to those human facial features. “You okay?” he prompted. “Did that omnic hurt you?”

The girl’s eyes swelled at him, pupils clutching small. Her cheeks darkened. She swallowed a couple times, then her mouth opened up and a high, thin cry rang out. Ana stiffened next to them, baring her teeth as she tightened around her rifle. The wailing became words, the girl’s eyes going jelly as she pointed at the church doorway, at the priest, at the floor beneath their feet. She made a fist and knocked it against his breastplate, screaming. The entire confession arrived in Spanish. “Uh…uh-oh,” Gabriel murmured.

The girl sniffed, hiccupped again, and wiped at her eyes.

“Pocho?” she gurgled. Gabriel’s face twinged its muscles from top to bottom, in a wave.

“Guilty.” He took a breath. “For the most part.” The girl knuckled at her eyes one more time, then settled both hands against his collarbone. When she spoke again, it was in English:

“What are you doing here?”

“Trying to put an end to the midnight.”

“You can’t.”

“We already did. Elsewhere.” Gabriel thought he could risk a smile as the girl’s eyes eclipsed. “Few other countries. We’ve got a pretty good idea of how it works now. And we fixed it.” He nodded to her. “We did.”

She didn’t say anything at first. Maybe she didn’t believe him. He supposed he did not look like anything particularly special to her. She fingered the flared white collar of his Commander’s jacket, her thumb leaving a stain. Her hand trailed across the circular decal on his body armor. She looked back up at him.

“Why didn’t you come here first?” Gabriel blinked. The girl thrashed her head from side to side. “Aren’t we closest to you?” she demanded. His eyes fell.

“Oh. To the US? Yeah. But--”

Rifle shots pattered behind the church.

Gabriel sighed, arms loosening around the moth-eaten girl. “Jack,” he apologized to Ana.

“I told you.” She whipped the long-gun at the roar of a machine grinding to life somewhere past the back wall. The girl kicked Gabriel’s stomach and wriggled out of his arms, dropping to the ground. She ran out the church’s front door. In her stead, to fill his empty hands, Gabriel retrieved his shotgun.

“I think she bit me.” He stared at the slip of his wrist between his glove and his coat sleeve.

“We need to get to Jack,” Ana said, and clambered up a series of dents in the cloister wall, hiking herself through broken glass ceilings back to the roof.

“You got it.” After a glance at the door, Gabriel marched forward, following the blond’s bootprints in a moldy film of water across the cloister floor. He nudged his earpiece. “Reinhardt, where the hell are you?”

“Pardon me, Commander Reyes. There was a family whose house was on fire!” Reinhardt sounded perfectly gleeful.

“Yeah, we had some of that here too.” Gabriel rotated his armguard up so he could access the nav holo. “There’s a mission church northwest of your position. I want you to sneak through that little matrix of shops outside.” The AI marked the implied route and he nodded, confirming the choice and broadcasting it out. “Skip the interior, Amari and I got it. Go around the sidewall, find Jack, and put a barrier in front of him.”

“I won’t let you down, Commander!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Twitter: [@Bible_Salesman](https://twitter.com/Bible_Salesman) / Tumblr: [@thebiblesalesman](https://thebiblesalesman.tumblr.com/) / Pillowfort: [@thebiblesalesman](https://www.pillowfort.social/thebiblesalesman) (there's nothing on Pillowfort yet btw!)  
> 
> 
>   * This is not exactly a prequel but sort of a companion to [Vampire in July](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20112613/chapters/47645077). It was originally conceived of as the leading set of chapters in that story, but I decided to omit it due to differences in perspective/writing tense/objective. I'll put both of these in some kind of series. Unlike Genji, whose entire plot including the resolution is basically laid bare in official lore, Reaper remains a mystery. So I might write a few of these, from different times and places, but they are guesses. Impressions.
>   * That said, this story also shares some DNA with my Genji history [Ceremonial Heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8557849/chapters/19619227), if only because omnics will always be very important to my Overwatch stories.
>   * Number of chapters is currently an estimate based on the length of my first draft.
>   * I wonder if my stories are going to slowly work down the AO3 rating system until I get back to Explicit.
>   * [Here's a simple timeline of official Reaper media I made when I was thinking about this stuff previously.](https://twitter.com/Bible_Salesman/status/1188284771895369728)
>   * I can dream of a Commander Reyes skin but it would probably make him look too much like Jack.
> 



	3. The Farm and All Its Wonders

Jack’s eyes, what is there to say? Grains of home in the midnight. A sky filtered of all its smog. Rising stars on Gabriel as he shoves through the ornate wooden door. The eyes of a box of cigarettes.

Mushrooms tailed after Gabriel’s glove as he let go of the door, falling from the old wood like buttons from a waistcoat. He ducked into the moonlight and Jack’s hand slipped back off his rifle.

“Where’s the kid?” Jack’s voice was a thresher in the dark. He resumed bandaging Lindholm’s shoulder as he spoke. It wasn’t just the kid, Gabriel thought. Jack has been antsy the whole mission. Burning extra blue. Maybe even back on the shuttle, though he was quieter then. Cause has to be extraneous to Dorado. Jack was always comfortable in a war, and never made a habit of _moods_. They didn’t let you into SEP without a brain or a modicum of self-regulation.

Gabriel added a check to the list in his head for later. _Writin’ you a check Jack, like the old days._ Most people longed for the old days, before the omnics.

“Ran away,” he answered. Jack’s steady lips transformed into a teeth-out scowl. His displays of concern were so charming. “Probably knows the area better than we do. Might have a whole network of rabbit-holes for herself.”

Jack hitched Lindholm’s shoulder plate into place and buckled the strap to the engineer’s cuirass. He stared at his reflection in the segmented metal.

“I was too quick on the trigger again.”

“Don’t say sorry for savin’ my arm!” Lindholm blew up, to the extent he dared. They were squatting beneath Reinhardt at the edge of the mission graveyard.

“We don’t do apologies,” Gabriel agreed. His glove closed on Jack’s warm skull, gliding through golden fields to the back of his neck. “We’ll talk about it later. Debrief.” He glanced at Lindholm’s wound. “I didn’t hear the initiating fire on their end. OR variant?”

“Strawberry.” Jack closed his eyes like a dog under Gabriel’s hand.

“Outside the core? That’s new.” Gabriel plucked his bodycam from its pin on his breastplate and held it around the corner of the wall. A hologram of the camera feed pushed from the wirework strapped to his forearm.

“It was by the angel,” Jack said.

Easy enough to spot the king of the graveyard: twelve feet of upstretched andesite wing framing the drooling crescent of the moon. The angel went down on one naked knee to offer a sword and white stone robe to the mound at his feet. Behind him stretched flat gray pond water, a Dozmary Pool absent the fountainheads that might once have transformed it into a shimmering veil. Several dark Bastion units sat in the water, wreathed by pale bloated knots. Fresh flowers nestled by the tip of the angel’s sword. His face was worn away.

Gabriel tapped his earpiece.

“Got a red one out there Amari. No visual from my position.”

“Scanning. I have two targets, behind the treeline.”

“Clear shots?” He leaned his head on the gray brick, staring at the fruiting enamels along the mission roof-- avocados, jaguars, cherubs, little monks down on their knees --but he couldn’t see her.

“Waiting,” she said.

“Guess they knew we were coming.” Gabriel refastened his bodycam and deactivated the holographic broadcast.

“Bet that civ told them,” Jack bristled. Gabriel smiled, for all it was worth in the blackness beside the graveyard wall.

“If the omnium is sending out core units for patrols, it’s low on staff. The diversion must be going well.” He thumbed the string of grenades wound around his armor, and raised an eyebrow at the yellow visor providing their only candle in the night. “Speaking of diversions, you’re being uncharacteristically quiet, Reinhardt.”

“I was trying not to impede on Torbjörn’s medical treatment, Commander,” the gigantic knight rumbled.

“Treatment, puh!” Lindholm roughed his arm in circles beneath his rebuilt plate, pumped his fist. “It’s just some bandaging. Doesn’t accomplish much save making me grumpy!”

“But you’re always grumpy.” Reinhardt’s visor tilted at Lindholm.

“So nothing has changed!” Lindholm grinned ferociously.

“I have the shots,” Ana crackled over the radio.

“Fire.” Gabriel flattened his hand over his ear. The sniper rifle warped the atmosphere over their heads, rocketing into the trees. A second shot vibrated through the wake of the first, births of bullets linked together in a single long shriek.

“One target down. One still operational. Hold.”

Gabriel watched Jack digging at his ears. Reinhardt consciously relaxed his shoulders, restraining his silhouette below the fringe of the wall. On Overwatch’s first mission-- long time ago, felt like --Reinhardt had shown less regulation when the rifle began cracking off over his head and relentlessly solving problems. Ana took him aside afterwards, rewrote him in a single afternoon. Now they were together a basket of patient, silent rattlers.

Gabriel and Jack sighed out lingering bloodlust simultaneously, and cast laughing eyes at each other. Blue eyes, like the wall of a kindergarten classroom to be papered over with Crayola doodles of pets and families. “Target acquired,” Ana chirped.

“Fire.”

The rifle boomed.

“Target down. Hold.” Another minute passed. “No additional targets. Destination identified, north-northwest, one-ninety paces past the mission border. I’ll watch over you.”

“Got it.” Gabriel called the neon map out of his armguard and gazed into its wireframe foliage. A campfire orange dot appeared in the miniature of the jungle. “Reinhardt, you’re up.” Gabriel shared the routing to the knight’s visor. “Lead the way.”

The moon wrote them soft and bleached as they crawled past the kneeling angel and the tranquil waters at his back. The graveyard’s rear wall had been bowled over by NDA tanks. Gabriel felt the jungle’s wild mud furl beneath his boot, take a memory of his footstep, sucking greedily at his treads as he soldiered on.

Rushing trees sting with odors of strange pollens and saps. Thorn-covered balls bolster the undergrowth. Giant green pods brush faces and shoulders, and the jungle is full of falling knocks, full of promises that bust open on the ground to reveal nothing but cottony string.

Bastions, autonomous armored wagons with solar sails, and the split rinds of living bombs prop lazily on ringed bark. The hills of Dorado concave down to this valley, so not all the corpses might be local. They might have rolled from some more heavenly battlefield. Gabriel never saw the red shells or distorted limbs of Ana’s called targets; she might as well have murdered ghosts.

Witchy flashes spooked up from the far sides of the hills, raining magenta across the team through the corkscrew trees. Gabriel witnessed the moon in patches, still watching him with its sleeping eye. Jack’s targeting UI lit a red precaution against his back. Lindholm’s boots shuffled through the seedy litter. Birds called to each other in the fiery night, uncaring. Gabriel’s skin twitched under his armor.

They crossed a tributary that chilled him to the waist, old oil stains winding off his coat and joining dark spools from upstream.

The omnium backdoor sat under the pulpy dress of an overturned tree with green still shooting through its leaves. A nearby sapling spiked into the air as they drew close, rising atop an erupting mound- the anti-tank cannon of a six-legged titan. Roots knotted thinly to the titan's navy carapace, the sapling plummeted off at the first swivel of the cannon, and disappeared in falls of soil from the titan’s back.

The titan was a miscalculation, built on the belief that anyone seeking entry here would bring APCs and _big guns_. An unmodified copy of the Ironclad Guild’s budget-tier blueprint, it pumped shells into the floor of the grove, just missing the wriggly organic shapes fanning around it.

Gabriel introduced the titan to the biggest guns it would ever meet, shoving his customs between the head swivel and the clamshell body. He blew out the cannon and climbed past onto the omnic’s convex hump, smirking as the machine guns on the flanks, trying to shoot him, hit the angle limits of their targeting spheres. Jack amputated the barrels with one surgical trigger pull at a time.

“Too slow!” Gabriel declared as the headless titan disgorged drones from its torn wiring. His shotguns bashed them out of the sky. Elbows reversed orientation below him and two of six legs batted upward. Gabriel decapitated the vices that served as hands and the titan swerved onto its side at a drunken angle. Reinhardt beat the flank armor open with his hammer. Lindholm pulled out a few precise fistfuls of cable. The titan switched off.

Jack joined him atop the humped spine, the two of them all eyes and ears while they waited for Ana to come down from the church. Lindholm blew the gate with some cobbled charges. Overwatch entered the omnium five-strong. A few muddy footprints preceded them: small, shoe-like.

At first the omnium’s private space called itself a hallway, with administrative rectangular steel.

Deeper in the reflections of the strike unit fragmented, growing apart from each other as iridescent reeds ciliated from the metal at all sides. Walls melted into floors. The tunnel curved backwards to the church. Translucent chained nanomachines beat humid breaths against their mouths and eyes.

Rings of flagella puckered on the walls and green jewels bulged out, long blue intestines unrolling from their bodies. Triple-barrel guns ejected from each Spring emerald carapace. Jack spurted the drones down with his rifle, Ana taking up a sidearm to assist, Lindholm lobbing superheated bolts. They moved down the churning black tunnel as a flotilla of measured gunfire.

The drones had slight variations in their activation cycles, like genetic wrinkles. Gabriel moved to the back to deal with an entire snowflake of tardy students, swapping a gun for a grenade and swirling it in his hand before lobbing it to the flock’s dead center.

Jack took a sharp breath. Gabriel followed his eyes. Above the rolling translucence of the roof drifted a quilt of floating coffins. The omnium’s shifting architecture had eaten all the way to the graveyard. The strike team could have shoveled their way down. Big cherry red coffins, little white ones, and worms.

The tunnel sharpened up into a single rectangle, a doorless gate to the core that was the color of Jack’s eye.

Gravity pulled away from Gabriel’s bones as he passed through. The smell in here-- salt, pahoehoe striking the sea. Boletes creeping down from the graveyard maybe. The tunnel’s nanomechanical molecules flowed out from the gate in shapeless self-illuminating clouds. The nanites swam in his breath, infiltrated his tear ducts. He turned back to find his friends and associates in a comical portrait on a blue soup wall.

Ana came forward before his order, her long boot breaking the illusion of ghouls pressed to a window. Her eyes hung on the amorphous core while he looked back at the others. Her clearance of the area came to him as a tug on the pinky of his glove.

“Alright, the rest of you.” They had to turn Reinhardt on his side, Jack and Gabriel dragging him through the merely human-sized door by his pauldrons.

In the original blueprint the room was not enormous. It was not the endless suffusing blue that the nanomachines pretended at. Ana’s eye, even hampered by the clouds, would sort out what Gabriel’s mapping device could not once it stopped receiving satellite data.

“Nine o’clock, nine meters.” She sounded like a countdown.

“The pillar?” Jack asked.

“An enemy.”

Four downturned needles wafted past each other in hilly, weightless hops. A shape like a ship’s bow emerged, spine sloping down to a tailless trapezoidal stump. It sailed toward them on bladed feet, sides flashing with each whimsical curve. The omnic stopped on midnight, frozen but for the cameras pivoting across its side in a gawky lateral line.

“Lindholm,” Gabriel demanded from the corner of his mouth.

“No. Not anything a human designed,” Lindholm growled. “It’s new.”

Spectral string grew out of the omnic’s needle-tips, stitching it to the floor. Roots, detaching seamlessly when it twisted its hull to face them, revealing a width across like that of a few stacked leaves. The cameras protruded off its nearly invisible angle like boils.

“Any guesses on weaponry?”

“It doesn’t have the housing!” Lindholm protested as the omnic prickled its way back to a profile display. An uncanny surge flicked up the back of Gabriel’s neck: _show-off._

“Could spear us with those legs,” Ana volunteered.

“Might be explosive,” Jack grunted out as an oath to keep his rifle quiet. Gabriel nodded.

“That’s my bet too. An invitation to destroy ourselves.” Why it didn’t rush them to force the confrontation was the remaining mystery-- underbaked programming, maybe. They’d seen similar defects previously in livestock of the omnium core.

Eggy amber light glowed inside the omnic’s cameras as it lurked, a headless and neckless giraffe, blurring when waves of nanites rolled over it. It was hard to tell just how far away it was.

Whistles pierced the mist on their flanks. Gabriel’s blood squirmed in his ears. The noises followed familiar melodic parabolas, guitars hollowing out into piccolos: _Amor Eterno._ “Amari, seven o’clock with me. Morrison, Lindholm, two o’clock. Reinhardt, use your eyes. Leghorns incoming.”

“Huh? Where?” Reinhardt deployed his barrier at the only visible omnic, his helmet rotating dumbly to either side. Ana stationed herself at Gabriel’s flank, her holstered rifle making a syringe spoke off her back. She was first to fire, catching an oncoming whistling machine in its oversized hammerhead with her sidearm. The omnic flipped backward over its own parts with a cluck and a volcano of black oil.

Others jogged up right behind it, two-legged, the size of children, exchanging rancheras with each other in the fog. They beelined for Reinhardt’s barrier, lasers spinning up in their wide mouth slots.

Leghorns, like the titan, were intended for dismantling payload vehicles and armored tanks. The singing was an unusual trademark, though Lindholm had once hypothesized a cause: omniums gazed endlessly onto the Net and regurgitated amalgamations of what they saw. Lindholm never pursued evidence for the theory. Gabriel imagined he didn’t want to find anything else. These blurred nostalgias happened with ever greater frequency since they began destroying the cores. A strawberry was not a strawberry.

“Don’t hit the one in the back,” Gabriel warned as the strike team’s bullets fired in a blending hum. He put an eye to the distant omnic occasionally. As leghorns flew apart and lost their voices, it bucked its fore-end, circling its original position with those ruminating hops. Nevermind, there was no front or back to it, it reversed its orbit as easily as a hummingbird. _Gazelle in Nigeria,_ his brain excused when another uncertain chill hit him right in the chest. _Stotting._

A gang of five leghorns spirited up to the frost line of Reinhardt’s barrier, all of them vocalists, pallid whistles struggling to follow the exquisite flexibility of the human mouth. They never pushed out a single whole word with their twitchy vocal processors, but his brain continued to supply the missing pieces. _Como quisiera, ay, que tú vivieras, que tus ojitos jamás se hubieran cerrado nunca!_ they wailed, the only correct note the pained _ay_ , holding it until the red-white beams they lanced at the barrier vibrated with the effort.

Three more leghorns skittered _through_ the barrier from Jack and Lindholm’s side, fixing their laser buzzsaws on Reinhardt’s ankle armor. Ana grabbed one by the back of its delicate neck and smashed it into the floor, its laser backfiring through its overweight head and melting a couple fingers of her glove. Lindholm jotted over fast enough to catch another with a hammer swipe, cursing all the while.

“Have a strong urge to run down that staring mockery who refuses to fight,” Reinhardt muttered as he lifted his boot and gently crushed the remaining leghorn beneath it.

“We’ll get there.” Gabriel ripped the quintet apart with fans of pellets as glowing crinkles soaked in from the edges of the barrier.

A baggy _pap_ , like a hand dropping to a thigh, flicked through his ears over the choruses of _Amor Eterno_.

He couldn’t place it in the mist. He looked out to the far omnic. It was rigid like a schematic. Its cameras dialed at his face.

Over his shoulder he saw nothing except Jack’s face, eyes searching, blue confusion.

Another _pap_ and a heavy whoosh of breath from Reinhardt as his boots left the floor. “SB on Rein!” Gabriel’s voice bombed in his chest as he turned his head up. 

But the gift was not only for Reinhardt: spirals of red antennae were already nesting down in Gabriel’s hair, wicking the sweat off his brow. Nanite capillaries open up inside the antennae and they swell, bulging into speckled crimson tentacles with iridescent wire pads. He has the sense to throw his arm between his face and the engorging segments, and they attach to his plasmetal armguards with sticky _pap_ s, ripping off his guiding devices. A lumpy coffin descends for each member of his team.

The silent kidnapper pulls him off the floor, leghorns screaming beneath his kicking legs. Long shadows compress over his cheeks and eyes, slip lower to get purchase on his guts, shrugging off the straps of grenades. Somewhere Jack is dragging on his rifle trigger but the reassuring firecracker is swallowed whole.

Gabriel’s ascension hurtles him past the dark outline of Reinhardt, too heavy for his own strawberry, his armored poundage dragging it out of the featureless blue ceiling. The long body fixes its deep red fingers on Reinhardt’s neck and rotates just that piece of him. Gabriel hears the throat guard crack. He jerks the arm his strawberry ate first and feels his shotgun at the end of it. He swings up its partner to fire together--

The weight at the other end of the tentacles rolls hard and the motion whiplashes through his body. He’s in a spiral. Laserlight curtains ripple frenetically on the sides of the voiceless figure above as it turns and turns and turns and turns. The free gun is whipped from his hand. He fires the other and the pellets puffball into air. He thrashes but it moves with him, absorbing the shock like a gelatin. Speckled orange cap zooms in, suddenly close, filling his eyes with color. Two huge camera lenses dilating at him underneath. Misplaced electronic rabbit legs swim on a distant tail. A hooded hole opens around his head and inside it two manipulator arms generate lightning between their black tips.

A jerk at his chest pulls him down from the light: Reinhardt, holding fast to one of the tentacles with a massive fist, shouting like a crashing wave _Commander! Commander!_ Their crazed windchimes lay tangled together after the anomalous connection. Gabriel came to a stop hanging limply, brain smacked into the backs of his watery eyes. Ana wouldn’t survive that force, he thought.

The strawberries felt along each other’s bodies. They delved down to the source of their cobwebbing. Red and orange tentacle pads foiled around Reinhardt’s wrist. Gabriel checked his remaining gun, and angled it ever so slightly inward against the taut coils. The shotgun’s tip sparkled beneath the electrical current within the strawberry.

He squeezed on the trigger and an explosion went up the strawberry’s throat, chunking out the other side of its armor cap. Surrounded by splinters of strawberry orange, Gabriel fell to the floor.

He hit gracelessly on his side, lost his breath, made a Liberty Bell out of his ribcage. Still wasn’t as bad as the headache. His attacker flapped down to chalk at his side, stretching past the bottoms of his feet for a long time. The flight sail sticking off its side dried up into wrinkly cellophane. Broken tentacles discharged nanite putty that crawled across the floor and wet his cheek.

Gabriel tried sitting up but the world was still in a spin. He settled for lifting his head.

Ana was just fine. A fan of dead leghorns and the crusty stuffing of a limp albino strawberry squiggled across the floor behind her as she raised her arms and caught Jack. His weight took her to one knee, and Jack was bug-eyed, hugging his rifle, black liquids dyeing his hair. Lindholm landed on his feet, just a blunt shadow in the distance but there was no mistaking him. The lava-filled shell of a plaid strawberry disintegrated as it floated to the floor at his back.

“Get Reinhardt,” Gabriel ordered, hoping it didn’t sound too much like a death rattle. Jack looked at him but Ana didn’t react, must not have heard. He must have been too far from the rest of them.

Jack scrambled over to Reinhardt’s hanging tombstone and jumped, tying both hands around his ankle. Reinhardt sank closer to the floor, tootling a polite _thank you_ from his head, still up in the mist somewhere. Ana propped up her rifle, watching the mist, then delivered a perfunctory shot that left a jet streak through the nanos.

Reinhardt landed on Jack. A brainless red strawberry bounced off his armor. Jack issued a weak groan from under the collapsing iron circus tent and Reinhardt activated the propellant in his suit joints, backing off onto his knees. Jack clawed free of the strawberry’s softer mass, even more disheveled now, spattered head to toe in inky remains. Reinhardt dropped a palm on the floor to steady himself. Ana stowed her rifle and bent to haul him upright. He followed her two small hands clasped around his huge glove with an adoring _My lady!_

Gabriel dropped his head back against the floor. He brushed his earpiece.

“Just like we planned.”

He glanced at the lone shotgun still hugging his fist. Needed to find the other one. Was it blood in his eyes or oil?

Shadows moved over his face. Thin, flexile bars. Needles on the move. The onlooker omnic towered over him upside-down. Its watery side reflected his eyes and in that mirror he was still spinning and lost. The stranger bowed to the floor on those legs like spider's silk and kissed the defeated strawberry with its lowest edge.

Nanomachines pooled aquamarine in the ragged hole where the strawberry’s CPU had been and began diagramming into gel matrices and wires. The small legs splayed awkwardly on the floor under the strawberry’s tail stump curled their toes. The antennae above the tail’s containment ring cocked to stiff attention.

Gabriel swung his shotgun at the strawberry’s head and fired rapidly, shredding it.

“Gabe!” Jack’s shocked shout was the first clear noise in the mist.

Gabriel put the shotgun’s mouth against the paper omnic’s side. His arm shook, but he kept his final shells quiet. Nanos poured relentless infrastructure through the strawberry next to him and its forebody buoyed up like an untethered balloon. Gold light spun inside its lenses. Most of the tentacles around its face drooped small and rotten.

What arms it had, it put around Gabriel. Rainbows reverberated off its sides but it could barely get itself in the air, nevermind him. Oil dripped out of its tentacles onto his face. The stranger turned, leaping into the mist, and the strawberry dragged him after it. He fought the lazy, lifeless hold, but where the strawberry could no longer roll it could still tighten, breaking his armor, digging into the gaps between his ribs.

Laser fire interrupted whatever Jack was roaring. Gabriel only had a shifting slit between arms to see through, but the laser cannon nubs on the ferrying strawberry’s belly hung inactive. He pushed a hand through the coils at his ear.

“I’m okay. Bunker down and protect yourselves.”

“You are _not_ okay,” Jack lashed back at him.

“Well, it’s not killing me.”

“Do as he says already! These things are coming back! We need to regroup.” Trust Lindholm to avoid any attempt at rescuing Commander Reyes.

A new light panned across Gabriel’s eye. He expected the bright white of the omnium core barrier, but--

But the core stood open, and the light he saw was the iridescing abyss of its insides, a gargantuan computing obelisk that swayed between canopies of wire. Something he had only seen in blueprints, construction photos. Omniums had their snow-white pillars and their energy barriers, and once you broke through both-- they self-destructed rather than letting you in.

The leading stranger left behind its prolonged leaps for a walking gait, circling behind the obelisk, split in half by the milky black ferment. Gabriel pressed his face to his fisherman’s net, gaining inches of peripheral view.

Beside the omnium core hung a structure without any historical schematic, a tumorous clump of cables dangling from the endless ceiling. The cables rustled and shifted as Gabriel was pulled closer.

A trio of Bastions dripped unfinished from the bent fingerbones of production beds, rotary guns with legs that stomped past Gabriel towards his team. The laser fire from earlier had yet to die out. He bent back into his earpiece. Someday he was getting that cover story, and when those jelly-eyed journalists asked him what his favorite weapon was, he was going to point at his mouth.

“Heads up, three recon units heading to your position from midnight--"

The strawberry electrified upwards in a breaching arch and tossed him at the obelisk, falling on its side after. Gabriel smashed into the base of steel cables and a splat of blood left his mouth.

_“Gabriel!”_

Jack.

Did you pick out a name for the new one yet Jack? Is it a horse or a heifer?

Gunfire loud as day he first heard it punched across his ears.

When Jack spoke to him, there was a little piece of his soul in it every time.

He was going to throw up.

Nanomachines dispersed from the dark, empty head of the strawberry. The rest of the SB units and the three newborn E-54s dropped dead.

Spinning blinding white around Gabriel as he groaned onto his feet, the omnium’s core barrier snapped shut.


	4. Star Child

Fibroblast cells crawl damaged vasculature and leave slimy trails of collagen. Fas ligands bind to outcroppings in the crushed flesh of the wound, rolling up the cytoplasm and loose hair DNA and recycling it for new, healthy growths. The rebuild occurs faster than in any other lifeform. Days turn into seconds. He is always growing and changing. What is called anatomy or structure in most organisms is in him fluid and compliant. Violence is an expected part of his metabolism.

One fibroblast has a malfunction in its autophagy-- its capacity to self-destruct. It is normal for it to die when its work is done. Instead it slows to a stop, and the entire blanket of cells warps around it, forming eddies and soupy trails of matrix across the bump of the hypothalamus. An eggy, many-armed white macrophage hits the cell’s protective sack. Each of its arms holds a chemical key to let it in, but none of them fit the irregularity. So it runs on.

Within moments a second macrophage bullies over the malformed cell and consumes it whole, destroying all evidence of its existence.

Gabriel blinked away the streaks of light. Heat from the obelisk blew across his face. He clawed a few rainbow wires out of his beard.

“You really gotta choose,” he told the omnic towering in the gauzy air behind the obelisk. His shotgun swung a languid parabola over the blacklight tile of the core. “Life or Death.” Some of the stranger’s lenses coiled small and shocked at him. “If you want to talk, you don’t need to kill us. That’s not a necessary part of the conversation.” He picked the leftmost lens to glare into. “You don’t have to send hundreds of Bastions through the city, bomb the forests…”

Gabriel exhaled sharply between his teeth. He hefted the shotgun mouth and ground it on the obelisk’s glossy face. “So did you have something for me? Or are you just broken from birth?”

Holes opened on the low edge of the stranger’s paper-thin shell. Out came iridescent helix tethers that took hold of the obelisk, fingers fraying and rooting into the black metal. The stranger wrenched the obelisk side-to-side, testing the cables that suspended it. Gabriel’s shotgun drifted back a few inches. Was it apoptotic after all? Why not just self-destruct?

A _thud_ bowed the pillar wall in with a coffee cup-sized dent. “That’ll be Jack." Shouts like rusty nails roughed against the wall. The omnic paused, blue light strobing gently out of its body down its arms. Gabriel tabbed his earpiece, but as he’d guessed when he woke to silence, the line was blocked. “He’ll rip you into little pieces.” Another dull explosion clunked into the wall. Jack had found his grenade belt. Gabriel smirked at the enormous, helpless coffin of the omnium. “Let’s get this done before he brings the house down on us.”

* * *

The familiar roar of the shotgun shook the white pillar, and the barrier desperately trying to ice back over the armored wall dissolved.

“Gabe!” Jack rested his thumb on the pin of the next grenade. Nanomachines dropped out of the air like smoking tinsel and melted apart on the ground. He switched the visor unit over his left eye to thermals. Heat was still mellowing orange out of the core. Ana ran over, her face a red mask. She removed her gloves and ran her hands across the pillar.

“Here,” she ordered, tapping two fingers on a seam. She knocked the bottom of her canteen three times against the pillar, then retreated to Jack’s side. They both flinched as the clot of wires hanging next to the pillar wrenched around on its long tether. Ana brought the rifle off her back and nodded to him.

He unpinned the grenade and swept it through a measured arc confirmed by his visor UI. It exploded with a timed _pock,_ tearing a black puzzle piece out of the wall.

Gloved hands reached out of the darkness and lined the ragged edges of the hole like long blue canines.

“Hi.” Jack could hear Gabriel’s smile in the shadows. His face lit and he rushed over. “Think we can open ‘er up if we both pull on the bottom,” Gabriel instructed. They worked together, and the power of two Soldiers was enough to disengage the omnium’s tendons and yank down its ashen bones. Gabriel stepped out. “Reinhardt, get over here and shield up.” Dots of blood where his pellets had reflected into his cheekbones oozed like a blush turned violent. Fragments of the obelisk twisted on their ropes behind him, dislocated from each other, unable to network, but still warm.

Their guide through the omnium lay behind the broken core, dead.

Jack picked pellets out of Gabriel’s face while they huddled under Reinhardt’s barrier.

The core was a dud. No self-destruct ever came.

The Gordian throng of wires wiggled in the ghostly circle of Ana’s flashlight, then abruptly dropped straight. Out fell the civilian omnic they’d chased across town. The back of its skull was ripped off to make room for red vessel cables that swooped into the black ceiling. The omnic’s exposed CPU rippled in swampy exchanges of nanofluid. There were punctures down its arms and holes drilled through its shoulderblades. Its lights switched on, a vomited mixture of aquamarine and gold and spots of red.

It curled in the oil dripping off its semi-excavated chest, spreading its hands over its faceplate.

It spoke out, in Spanish. Its electronic voice bobbled and grinded like it was swallowing down spit. It continued in Spanish, and traces of Portuguese. Like a leghorn, singing. Its slippery fingers propped it away from the floor. Oil fell out of its eyeslots as its lights glistened off the architecture of its hands.

“I’ll take the CPU off that one,” Lindholm growled. Jack referenced Gabriel, who nodded. Jack leveled his rifle and walked towards the omnic.

Its head rose at him, his silhouette breaking the blue stars of its indicators, his teeth just glinting from under his frowning lips.

“I’m supposed to be strong,” it said in perfect Midwestern English as Jack raised his rifle. Accent based off Kansas City. Jack exhaled with meditative slowness. “But I’m not,” the omnic gasped. “This body feels so nostalgic.” It puzzled itself over onto hands and knees. It clambered to its feet with a synthesized wheeze tuned to resemble the checkering of adrenaline. It limped into the falling mist, hand outstretched.

A spatter of yellow gunfire lit the dead omnium. The civ model screamed at first. Jack came up behind it, put his boot on its back, and wrapped a hand around the forest of cables lining its neck. The noises it made distorted as he ripped the crying skull clear of the body. He lobbed the recovered mass at Lindholm.

“Thanks!” Lindholm rotated the head to drain the remaining oil somewhere other than across his coveralls. Gabriel joined Jack, switching on a light at his belt and turning the dismembered omnic over with his foot.

“Huh.” He wagged the toe of his boot at the marigold stenciled on the omnic’s soaked apron. “Worked at that flower shop.”

A weight enveloped Gabriel from the side. Ana, hugging onto him. Jack yoked an arm over his shoulders. “I’m fine,” Gabriel informed both of them briskly, holding their bodies against his for a moment. “Jack, take Reinhardt and clean the leftovers.”

Lindholm sat down in the middle of the omnium to pry the civ’s faceplate and divine its CPU from under the newly installed wiring. Reinhardt and Jack wandered the blackened mist, progress punctuated by the occasional titanic echo of Reinhardt’s hammer smashing a leghorn head flat.

Gabriel and Ana returned to the core. Their flashlights swung around the broken pieces. Gabriel blinked at their white reflections in the stranger’s permanently dilated lenses.

“Why do omnics down here always look like the end of the world?” he muttered at Ana. Her eyebrows went up, briefly. She was used to his post-mission philosophizing.

“The beginning,” she suggested. “They’re primordial.” She rested her hand on the stranger’s glass flank. A touch of heat ran through Gabriel’s cheeks and the blowback dents in his skin ached.

“In the cores they stop using the proven designs Lindholm and his people gave them.”

“He’s not responsible for everything, Gabriel.” Ana watched him rub his palm at a cargo pocket above his knee. “What is it?” His eyes rose out of the skeletons and squids to her. “It’s the first time anyone has gotten this close. What did you see in there?” she prompted, nudging his shoulder with her own.

“I’ll show you and Jack later, when Lindholm isn’t around.”

Ana sighed.

Reinhardt hit the stranger with his hammer and they left its scattered shards lying in the ruins of the omnium. “We’ll canvas all the buildings again on our way out,” Gabriel said. “See if we can find the kid.”

* * *

They didn’t find her.

Reporting, and reporting again, and reporting again. No one’s mouth but Gabriel’s would do, and the Crisis had a lot of stakeholders. People from town set up a small generator, just enough to switch on a few colorful lights below Overwatch’s camp in the hills. Night rolled around again and Gabriel’s shoulder muscles twitched, anticipating a mission.

He lay on his back, pillow cast off the side of his cot. He preferred the sag of the canvas under his head. Holograms wound between him and the stars. He’d dressed down to cool cotton, the digital tortoiseshell snugging up his throat in a brief turtleneck. Old Army dogtags rested in the well of his breastbone. Ana sat on the side of the cot cleaning her rifle, the black stripe of her undershirt dipped into her spine by sweat.

A star fell out of the sky. Gabriel’s eyes lifted free of his glowing emails-- _no need for Gabriel Reyes and his band of rogues in Russia_ , they said --and followed the star until it disappeared under the green of the trees.

“There’s Fareeha!” Ana shouted. Gabriel turned his head, looking much lower than stars. A carrier shuttle opened its sliding bay door as it floated to the landing pad, and Fareeha stood right at the open edge. She was all smiles, dark bob cut rippling in the blowback, waving her arm into the atmosphere. Gabriel’s jaw constructed ambitions of hardening, holding back, but all he did was grin like a fool at the flying girl. Ana cased her rifle and propped it on the cot’s foot before she left for the landing pad.

Still smiling, Gabriel drew his finger down the holo controls to read the next message coming in.

Wildgrass crinkled under feet outside the camp. He sat up from the cot.

The missing kid stood between the blue current of the border shield and the unrolled chainlink of the camp’s makeshift fence. Her eyes locked on him, underlit by the glimmer of the electronic campfire beside his cot. She had something angular and metallic in her right hand.

He stayed where he was until he identified the object.

He swung his legs off the cot, advancing with heavy bootfalls. The girl barely blinked. Her eyes were like an omnic’s steady lights. Gabriel crouched beside the fence.

The girl stuck a smartphone through one of the holes in the chainlink.

“From my house,” she declared. Gabriel collected the phone and thumbed the screen, which lit a torch under their conspiring faces.

“Where’s your house?”

She elbowed at the fires still licking the far side of Dorado.

“It’ll teach you Spanish.” Her hand squeezed through the chain and opened a children’s study guide app from the home screen. None of the phone’s messenger service icons showed any notifications. A few dictionary holograms popped out and scrolled past Gabriel’s face.

“Hola,” he demoed for her. Her lips flattened together.

“Buenas noches,” she enunciated. Gabriel couldn’t get his hand through the fence like she could. He poked the phone back through the cradle of chains with a finger.

“I think you’ll need this when they get things running around here again.”

The girl shoved back with both hands, shaking her head. Her hair was clipped down to nubs.

“I’ve got loads of others.”

Gabriel pocketed the phone. He studied her clothing: fresh hazard orange t-shirt, blue shorts, bandages on her bloody knees.

“I see you’ve been though our Survivor Relief unit.” The girl pinched the bottom of the t-shirt, peering at its circular white emblem. “Took what you needed and moved on? What now? Going to live in the woods?” He smiled a little. The girl didn’t smile at all. “Glad you found us again.”

“You weren’t hard to find.” Her hand came up and rested on the fence. Her small fingers flexed against the wire.

Gabriel unhooked his thermoknife from its sheath on his thigh and showed her the magma-colored blade. She let go of the fence. He cut through it, and she stepped inside. He returned the melted remains of the barrier after and held a finger against his lips. The girl giggled. When he rose and returned to the campfire, she followed him.

“Khalo! Khalo!” Fareeha came springing up the well-lit path from the landing pad in a yellow sundress. She smacked into his side with a consuming hug, noticing only when she loosened up that there was a tagalong hiding behind his legs. Her mouth shrank to a small triangle. Ana, coming up the path behind her, abandoned a cultivated smile and stalked forward. She bent, curling a finger under the strange girl’s chin.

“This area is restricted,” she said coldly. “Did you get registered?” Gabriel’s brow furrowed. “Did they clean you up? Lice and ticks?”

“You don’t need to embarrass her.” Gabriel grasped her shoulder. “You can see they shaved off her hair.” Ana straightened at his behest, but her eyes did not leave the anomaly. Fareeha still had a numb hand around Gabriel’s pantleg, heart-shaped face following her mother. Gabriel tapped her sandal with his boot. “Hear that, Fareeha? It’s a restricted area,” he parroted. “Priority access only.” Ana narrowed her eyes at him.

“Oh.” Fareeha tensed, looking around. “Should I go back to the shuttle?” Gabriel squatted to meet her eye-to-eye.

“I’m just messing with you.” He cupped the crown of her dark hair.

“Oh!” That winning smile surged back. “Khalo! They’re playing mariachi in the town square! I saw it from the ship!”

“We could put in an appearance,” Ana dreamed behind her daughter.

“Oh yeah?” Gabriel glanced between the two Amaris. “Sounds like a plan. Though I coulda sworn it was a school night or somethin’.” He lidded his eyes at Ana. She ignored him. “You see Jack?” he asked, and she allowed a small shake of her head. “Well then ladies, I will be right back.” He headed down the lantern path to the camp’s lower strata. A look over his shoulder identified the purple-eyed girl frozen deerish in Ana’s shadow. “You staying with them or coming with me?” he called, and the girl jolted free, running down after his boots.

He led her to the sprawl of blue and white tents eating up the base of the camp like a misplaced carnival. Inside under the bright lights were kids asleep in bunkbeds, kids staring listlessly at soft walls, kids moaning as their wounds were treated. Babies crying unattended.

Gabriel stopped beside one of the smaller infants, just healthy enough not to get wired to a mechanical matron. He opened the thermostasis crib and ran his thumb across the baby’s forehead, which was ridged with the effort of squalling. When that was not enough, he picked the tiny figure up against his shoulder and rocked him a while. The girl at his side alternated between watching him and scanning the rest of the tent for nosy staff.

The baby quieted, and Gabriel returned him, closing the transparent plastic cover. Hand resting over the logo on the top, he looked across the galleries of lost infants, dozens more still crying.

The girl reached for a staff laptop full of patient diagnostics abandoned on a nearby stool. Gabriel took her by her seeking arm and they snuck from the wards to a supply station. There he found what he was looking for: a tall cloth bin, too tall for the girl to see in, though she stood on her toes and tried. He dug his arms over the side, and popped out holding a teddy bear with an Overwatch logo dark across its heart.

He offered it to the girl. She took it, holding it by one arm away from her body.

“How does this help you find that bolillo?”

“It’s for you,” Gabriel explained patiently. “I got a thing about debts.” He knocked on the phone in his pocket. “So, a gift for a gift. It’ll help you sleep.”

“Gee, thanks.” She filed the teddy under her elbow.

“Didn’t know I had to deal with my own Commander stealing supplies on top of the regular shortages,” a hard voice cropped in behind Gabriel.

“Shortages?” Gabriel spun on his heel, smiling into the leathery, scar-strewn face of the Overwatch Relief Coordinator. “What do you need, Memo?”

The other man rubbed the ribs of his glasses.

“An interestingly endearing tone from someone who never talks to me outside prescribed meetings. How about more kids’ beds?” Memo’s bloodshot eyes glinted at the girl beside Gabriel.

“Running low?”

“We’re out. There’s too many of them.” Memo sniffed at the antiseptic-riddled air. He removed his glasses and tapped them on his leg. “We’ve got sleeping bags in some of the other tents, and we’ve asked adults to give up their mattresses. Compounds our laundry needs and…” He shuffled closer to the girl. “Tracking.” Gabriel reached back and warmed the girl’s head under his hand.

“Didn’t realize they couldn’t just come and go as needed.”

Memo slipped the glasses back on so he could squint at Gabriel.

“I don’t think you understand what the media would do if a child that entered this facility left without proper documentation and got hurt or went missing.”

“Don’t really care what the media would do.”

“I know you don’t. But I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’d rather see you return home as a hero. So if I’m actually in charge of this wing of operations…”

“More beds,” Gabriel resolved.

“You might want to think about reallocating funds now that you have the omnium problem down to a surgery.”

“Maybe.” Gabriel bit his lip at the older man’s gravelly momentum. Hundreds of awards in his field, the UN dossier said. Mastery of a dozen languages. His grandson led the National Defense Army's diversion mission, and his own service record went back to before the existence of Gabriel Reyes. Old Memo had known a world without the Net. “Rebuilding isn’t really my area.”

“I’ll email you my recommendation. And as far as security.” Memo crossed his muscular arms and fixed the girl under his hellish brown eyes, theatric this time.

“Thought I’d help you recover her myself. Heard about the great escape,” Gabriel guessed, tightening his hand on the girl’s shaved head, that she might understand. “Take it she has to use one of those sleeping bags?”

“Tent Number Five, please.”

“Can we keep the bear?”

“Get out of here, Commander Reyes. This isn’t a place for you.”

Something pushed up from Gabriel’s heart, heated his jaw, but he couldn’t spell it out before Memo turned and limped away. Didn’t matter, he thought as he took the girl’s hand and steered her outside.

She pulled hard on him while they stood between tents. Gabriel let her go.

“I only said that to throw him off,” he told her. “Don’t worry. We’re getting out of here.” The girl’s face shrunk in surprise, then evened out, cool and dark.

“I knew that.”

“We just gotta find Jack.” Gabriel searched up the hill. In his peripheral the girl crossed her arms around the teddy. “He’s that scary, huh? Guess he does look like a ghost.”

Lindholm’s worktable glowed in a volcanic spout behind Reinhardt’s tent. His eyes were magnified behind owlish goggles as he repaired the Crusader neckguard. Reinhardt’s unarmored leg stuck out of the tent flap. Whipped cream and stout flowed warm and coppery over the earthy musk of the camp. “There he is.” Gabriel headed up, the girl toddling along behind on the steep hill. She rested her mouth on the teddy bear’s cottony head. Her lips mealed against the brown threads of its fur.

They dodged Lindholm by circling to the front of the tent and entering under a clumsily tied drape. Reinhardt sprawled on the floor wreathed in empty steins. Jack Morrison lay on a cot in the corner, flat against the canvas, pillow tossed aside. His eyes were closed too, a quartet of steins sparkling on the little prop table beside the cot. Gabriel sat down at the bedside. The girl watched Jack over his knees. He leaned over until his shadow crossed Jack’s face.

Jack’s eyes opened hard and pale in the night.

“How’s the alcohol treating you, Morrison?” Gabriel smirked. “Clippers or Timberwolves?”

“Was that tonight?” Jack’s eyes rolled up at the tent top. “Timberwolves.”

“Ooh, not good to bet against the West Coast.” Gabriel bared his teeth. “We didn’t forget everything just because we were hiding in the shelters.”

“Can’t believe we missed it…”

“We’ve got VIP boxes in every stadium that’s left. We’ll make it eventually.”

Jack lidded his eyes at Reinhardt.

“It doesn’t do anything anymore.” He frowned up at Gabriel. “You don’t even try anymore.”

“I’ve been hanging around Ana for too long.”

“What are you talking about?” the girl piped up over his leg.

“Oh.” Jack swallowed his surprise and grunted a gloved hand out at her. He was still wearing his mission regalia. “Are you gonna be okay?” The girl shrank out of sight behind Gabriel.

“Too bad, Jack,” Gabriel hummed. “Before anything else, she saw your true face.” Jack deflated on the cot. He dragged his legs off the side so he could sit next to Gabriel, who put an arm around his back. He stared through the tent flap at the darkness waiting just outside. Gabriel rubbed his shoulder through the heavy blue jacket. “Fareeha’s here.”

A glow surged through Jack’s face, pink apple cheeks. “She says they’re dancing down in the plaza,” Gabriel continued with a heft of his eyebrows. “Mariachi.” And Jack broke into a huge grin.

“Really? You going? I have to see it.”

“You’re gonna do more than see it,” Gabriel snarled. “Shower first. You smell like death.” He sent Jack out of the tent with a shove on the small of his back.

Gabriel and the girl took opposite sides of the mountain sleeping on the floor. She fit her hands over the round of Reinhardt’s shoulder and rattled him, to the extent she could rattle a boulder. Gabriel poked at one of the ears sticking out from matted blond hair. “Reinhardt,” he called. “You want to go dancing? Reinhardt?” No response.

“Is he dead?” the girl asked.

“Don’t think so.” Though Gabriel didn’t check before they left to collect Jack from the showers. The forest green tent walls flapped around them like squares of laundry in a field of clotheslines. Jack emerged in a fresh blue copy of his uniform. Gabriel coughed.

“I thought-- since we are going to be in public--” Jack reviewed Gabriel’s cool shirt and nanofiber tactical pants. “Should I change?”

“Nah. You’re probably right. You just might get hot,” Gabriel chuckled. Jack pulled off the ankle-length coat as they walked back to the top of the hill.

“How did Amari get away with never drinking in the first place?” Jack complained.

“She drinks tea.” Gabriel slapped the navy block of Jack’s uncovered shoulder. “Don’t covet. She’s just super-human. Not like us.” He grinned and waved to the Amaris standing around the green campfire pallet. Fareeha ran down to meet them, an ID badge with stickers from all over the globe flapping from her dress strap. Her mother followed. Gabriel hung back, letting Jack receive his share of gleeful hugs.

He glanced down his side at the girl. “Hey.” She blinked up at him. “What’s your name, kid?” Those meteor eyes streaked up and down his face.

“Olivia.” She smiled.

“Nice.” Gabriel whistled for Fareeha and she let go of Jack, bouncing over. “Fareeha, this is Olivia.” Fareeha searched his face too, and the other girl’s, but she was a quick study. She had met lots of _Olivia_ s.

“Hi!” She closed the gap, sprouted taller than her shaved counterpart. Three years older, Gabriel guessed. Or less, given the living conditions. “Want to hold my hand while we walk to the plaza?” Fareeha smiled.

Olivia tightened on her teddy bear. She looked around, at all the eyes, and stuck out her arm. Fareeha started down the hill with her, rattling off some tried-and-true platitudes about Cairo and how it compared to Dorado, while Olivia listened a lot and talked little, wide-eyed.

Gabriel met Jack and Ana at the top of the hill. There he had another moment to wrap them under his arms. They knocked foreheads-- as always, Jack’s was the stoniest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * Chapter in which I reveal that the purpose of this story is to give a background to Sombra's teddy bear.
> 



	5. Dance Till You're Dead

_Ella era diferente, y a su mejor amiga le regalaba flores_

_Ella era diferente, pero así es la vida de algunos amores_

“You’re stepping on my boots, Jack.”

Jack snorted, a two-legged bull on the dance floor. Gabriel raised their joined hands into the golden light. “Well folks, that would be how you dance corrido in Cali, but as you can see…some men cannot be taught,” he mourned, and Jack guffawed, propping an elbow on his shoulder as they stood together on the hardwood stage.

Gabriel’s arm dropped, hand stationing beside the service pistol on his thigh. He glanced at the shadows in broad hats lined up behind him and Jack. “Think I heard one of our players is gonna lend him a guitar anyway.”

“I might have two left feet, but my friend Gabe here has a tin ear,” Jack interjected. “I’m gonna help him out with this next one.” Teenagers at the front of the attending crowd whispered and giggled among themselves. Aside from the fires in the distance, it was a party.

The outline of a man in a sinfully white suit offered up a guitar with a smiling skull motif. Jack reeled it close to his heart and retreated, making a blue bow at the end of the mariachi line.

“I’ll have Agent Amari come up here and assist me in demonstrating an old-school quebradita.” Gabriel flourished his camo fabric arm out to her.

“Not going to let me off with cumbia?” she laughed, clarifying out of the shadows in gilded brown patches between the black of her hair and the black of her shirt. She ducked under his arm and snared her hand across his mid-back. Her fingers dug on his spine. She had not been a dancer when he met her.

“Don’t feel like taking my boots off in this town,” he whispered back as she snuggled in close. Smiling under the dark of his mustache, Gabriel commanded from the corner of his mouth, “Give us a faster beat now, Jack.”

“On it.” Jack huddled with the bone-colored mariacheros. Improvised communiques involving rolls of hands and grumbly blurbs of English prickled through the air. Jack had a few players switch to their electric instruments. Once he struck the leading chords on his borrowed acoustic, the rest of the musicians rang true.

The sun could have risen straight out of the midnight. Ana’s hair whirled around Gabriel like a shining abyss. Their joined hands swirled at their sides, echoes of the tempo in their pressing hips. They were much too old to be dancing this way, and much too young. Ana was strong enough not to get torn out of her boots. She stayed with him, with the floor, and sometimes, briefly, with the air. Her face filled with an uncommon toothy smile as he dipped her almost to the dirt, and her whoop cleared over the din of the plaza as he swallowed her back up.

Their audience clapped and imitated. Fareeha and the other kids jumped up and down. Gabriel and Ana did not let go of each other. He felt her reflecting on his skin like firelight. She put her arms up, wrists together, and spun on the toes of her boots in front of him. He dragged her off the film of the earth and she rose above him in his hands.

They finished, panting against each other’s bodies. Her sweat, and Jack’s cologne. Gabriel’s arm broke off her and reached blindly, finding their third soldier and welcoming him back into the fold. The guitar squished between their bellies. They were laughing at each other, though there wasn’t a joke. The salt of the ocean crept through the rosy alleyways.

Jack’s head rose, generator-powered streetlamps catching on his hair. Gabriel heard it too. He just chose not to process, to keep smiling with Ana, to let her narrate it out when the first vehicle puttered around a red corner into the plaza.

“Press found us,” she cursed.

The crowd mutated in front of the cameras, shoving together, a vice at the three soldiers’ backs. Gabriel’s hand crushed on Jack’s shoulder as the spotlights strobed on. Jack climbed out ahead, back on the pedestal in front of the silent white mariachi.

He returned the guitar, and someone replaced it with a baby as lens flashes splintered the air. Gabriel withdrew to the shadows at the edge of the plaza. Ana was there, rummaging through a rucksack she had left in a planter of freshly buried morning glories.

Gabriel stared from his walled keep at that singular white face surrounded by worshipping brown smiles. He squinted as the image was fired into everlasting gold atop the cobblestones.

Ana stuck something plastic against his hand and his fingers contracted, pulling it up in front of his chest. It was a slotted carton filled with dusty, withered strawberries. Classic red, peachy orange, and albinos that resembled oblong eyeballs with rows of pupils.

“Is this a joke?”

“It was what they had,” Ana said. She tugged out a water bottle and popped off the cap, hanging her head back to drink. She passed it over to him. “Your balance has certainly recovered.” Gabriel drained half the bottle on his own.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You could barely navigate that jungle on the way back. When the inflammation hit, you blacked out. Medical assigned you bed rest for the whole day.” She took the bottle and corked it up, disappearing it back into the rucksack. “Or did you choose not to remember that part?”

“Well…” He mulled his thumb across his fingers, then poked down and retrieved himself a plump orange strawberry. “Those SBs were a _lot_ bigger than the ones at the previous site.” He tossed her a couple red ones. “And fewer lasers, more CQC.”

“The ones outside were the same as before,” Ana wondered through a mouthful of juicy flesh.

“Whipped the core units up special for us, you think? Adaptation cycle’s getting ludicrous. At least they still have programming issues,” Gabriel clipped through his analysis, cheering as he talked shop. Ana stuck out her hand for more fruit. He gave her a bouquet. She sharpened her teeth on one of the white ones, watching him as he continued, “You know it doesn’t matter if me or Jack get shot, or stepped on by a titan, or hit by a truck, right?” All she did was roll her eyes. Gabriel perked off his attempt at inhaling one of the strawberries, adjusting his stance, facing her a little tighter. “We get right back up. This is what we are for. It’s why we can pull this off with such a small team. There’s nothing reckless to the mission in it, just an honest calculation of what we can take. I’m not overdoing it.”

Ana posed a red berry to her mouth like it was a tube of lipstick, words coming around the bulbous, seedy body:

“I guess it’s just been a while since I’ve seen you bleed from your eyes.”

“Mum! Mum!” Fareeha’s crystallized light drew their heads to a nearby alley. She came springing out, Olivia in tow. Olivia was squirming, staggering, throwing out her orange-wrapped back as she tried to break free of Fareeha’s relentless momentum. “Olivia threw up!” Fareeha announced with breathless loudness. Her eyes circled wide as Olivia burst into tears beside her.

“Por favor perdóname,” Olivia wept, wiping at her betraying eyes. Ana crossed her arms.

“Did you get her water and clean her up before you raced her here, ḥabībti?”

Fareeha nodded, letting go of Olivia, who hid her face behind Fareeha’s sundress.

“What did you give her to eat?” Ana pressed.

“Conchas from the shop, like you got for Khalo…” Fareeha teetered into silence as she evaluated the healthy green cup of strawberries in Gabriel’s hand. “Um. Well it’s colorful like a concha anyway...”

“That’s too much.” Ana shook her head. “Much too much for someone in her situation.” She noticed Gabriel stuffing his face instead of commenting and her face filled with lines at him. He swallowed, and got down on one knee.

“Avena,” he suggested, to jog Fareeha’s memory. She looked down at her reflection in a silty puddle, frowning at herself. “Bananas. Simple things, easy to digest. Think about what nutrients she needs first. Remember what I told you?” He patted his bicep. “You don’t get this from pastries.” She popped up to glare covetously at the flexed muscle.

“It tasted good though.” She blushed.

“How many did you have?” Ana inquired wearily. Fareeha held up a few fingers, bouncing on her toes, grinning. “Why don’t you burn it off with some laps around the plaza?” her mother sighed.

“Hm, okay!”

As Fareeha tore off through the patterns of the plaza, Olivia was revealed, eyes draining into the muddy head of her teddy bear. She hid her mouth and nose behind the bear and crumpled its dirty fur against her t-shirt. She dried her eyes on its ears. As her vision cleared, she stuck an arm up at Gabriel. Smirking, he wrapped her against his shoulder, and she blustered gravely _perdón_ s against his camo. As he stood up with her, Ana was smiling at him, her hand briefly at the knots of his wrist.

“I like your dance…” Olivia droned through her nose against his shoulderbone.

“What ones do you know?” Gabriel fished the bear out from under her and secured it on his belt with a Velcro loop.

“None…”

“Surely you’ve danced before,” he chided. She didn’t make any more noise, even to cry. Her face turned away from his, mushed into his arm. He rubbed her back. “You gonna throw up on me?”

“She’s asleep,” Ana clarified. _Ah._ So that warm, wet texture soaking into his sleeve was drool. Ana took the strawberry carton from him and he navigated the back of his hand to Olivia’s forehead.

“Doesn’t have a fever.” He rocked her. “I kinda assumed she ate when she went through processing, but if they were doing med exams first, maybe she didn’t get that far.” He found himself gazing into the same sludgy mirror Fareeha had used. His reflection was dark and glint-eyed, a silhouette. “Her day started a little differently from ours. Shouldn’t have dragged her into all this,” he confessed.

“It’s good for you.” Ana nibbled strawberries as she watched him. “Like Fareeha is good for you.” Gabriel lowered his eyes.

“You have to be careful.”

“With what?”

“You only let her see our victories.”

“That’s the problem with you as Commander. All we see is victory.” The elegant angles of Ana’s nose and chin dipped into the light as she looked out at Jack. He was stepping down from the stage to take questions from excited reporters, patiently asking them to repeat in English. “Shouldn’t you be up there? Didn’t you want to be interviewed?”

“Just on the cover.” Gabriel secured Olivia over one arm and fumbled down his side for a phone. The first one he found was the cracked purple device she had given him. It didn’t even have a connection. Clucking his tongue, he stowed it and searched the compartments ringing his belt. “Was looking for an opportunity to call my wife anyway,” he told Ana. He went through the motions of fast-dialing her through the number _1_ key once he had the correct electronics in-hand. Twenty-two thousand miles above them, a UN satellite laced by plasma holes swiveled its silver dishes between the oncoming signal and the destination.

Ana stared at him with a fire going behind her eyes. “Hey,” he said into the phone with a big smile. “Yeah. We got it done. Oh, is she still awake? You couldn’t sleep? I’m sorry honey… Yeah, I’ll switch it over.”

He held the phone out in front of himself and hit the video toggle. “Here’s Daddy,” he grinned. “Still has his fingers and toes and everything. And this is Olivia.” He tried turning his burden at the phone lens. Olivia ground her ear into his shirt. “We got her out of a situation.” Gabriel turned the phone around the plaza. “I don’t know how well you can see, but there’s Jack in the thick of it as usual. There’s Ana. That blur that went by Ana’s leg is Fareeha. So we’re all here. We’re all okay.”

“How many more, Dad?” The voice that shrilled out of the phone speaker wasn’t as small as he remembered it.

“That info isn’t for phone chat. You know the rules.” He actually wasn’t sure if that lonely voice understood the particulars of covert international taskforces. He sifted through the allowable intel he’d been given. “Of course there’s Russia. There’s one under the sea too, so I’ll have you mail out my snorkel and fins.” The face in the phone sighed. “We’re handling everything we can. If they’ve already resurrected the NBA and NFL, I can’t imagine this goes on for too much longer. No matter what, I’ll see you soon.”

When he hung up, Ana robbed him of the phone so she could text with his wife. “Miss that kid a lot,” Gabriel mumbled.

“If you miss her, bring her here.” Fareeha dashed by them for the sixth time.

“We’ve been over this.” Gabriel watched Ana lean on the planter, the moon blue glow of the flowers and the messaging app making a phantom of her face. He pointed at the phone. “There are in fact higher powers than me on this issue.” Ana narrowed her eyes at the keys she was flicking with her thumbs.

“I guess we don’t choose who we fall in love with.”

He retreated a step from her stooped outline. Her dark hair melted into the sweaty black of her shirt. She took off her beret and ran her fingers through her split ends.

“You got that right.” It came out shallow. His eyes tore away as she turned to hand over the phone.

Jack stumbled up to them.

“Did I do okay?” he begged. Ana and Gabriel pivoted to each other, caught each other’s blank faces, and self-corrected. Gabriel stretched out a smile.

“You’re a natural fit for those monsters, Jack.”

The press scattered when they did, but the people of Dorado remained, gathering in spirals across the plaza. Gabriel heard water drums beat open, and rattles of gourds followed them up the hill. When he reviewed the town at his back, he didn’t see the mariachis anymore, just civilians with home-stretched leather and reedy flutes. In the center of the rippling rings two men danced the Venado, but instead of a deer mask, the man playing the prey wore the severed faceplate of an omnic.

* * *

“Man, I like it here.” Jack pulled off his shirt as he faced the low red hint of the sunrise past a black jigsaw of trees. “The sun is heavy.” He mushed the sweat off the back of his bare neck.

“We’re leaving at 0700.”

Jack twisted on his cot, peering at the Overwatch Commander thumbing through a tablet on another cot across the fire. The sleeping girl remained collected over his heart. Covertly as he stretched on a fresh layer of camo linen, Jack studied the shadows under Gabriel’s eyes.

“Have you gotten any rack since we landed?”

“You mean besides when, according to Ana, I swooned off my feet in the jungle?” Gabriel hummed. “You know the best place for shut-eye is the shut-tle.”

“Oof.”

“Don’t you fucking ‘oof’ me, John Francis. You’ll laugh and you’ll like it.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Tea, Jack?” Ana was ghosting over with three mugs already in-hand, Jack wasn’t allowed to decline. Gabriel snuck a hand out for his. Neither of them had been tea drinkers before they met her.

For a while they drank, the sun got _heavy_ , and the camp beneath them became noisy with progress. A breeze came over where they lay, carrying the mossy perfumes of a beckoning wilderness. Splitscreen with his UN email, Gabriel opened an image search of diving off the Dorado coast. He scrolled down thumbnails of colorful coral umbrellas and vibrating seahorse fins. Closing the browser window, he looked out at the sea. The slow purple waves were full of oil.

Jack’s tea mug clunked down on the plastic table beside his cot. Gabriel got up, moseying around the campfire pad. When he reached Jack, he held out the mute, limp body of Olivia to him.

Jack swallowed, eyes showing their whites. He flattened his palms on the tops of his legs.

“This is what you said you want when it’s all over,” Gabriel challenged him. “So give it a shot.” Jack’s hands didn’t move. _It’s only easy for him in front of cameras._ “You know most of them don’t come off the line with blond hair and blue eyes. This is what they really look like.”

“I know that.” Jack sounded hurt as he accepted Olivia into his arms. Gabriel leaned over the pair of them.

“Like a sack of potatoes,” he sparkled. Jack scowled at him, adjusting Olivia’s shaved skull to a comfy angle on his shoulder. He attempted to keep his peace, to let her soft snores be the only melody across the fire. He failed.

“You guys were smart enough to do it beforehand.”

There it was. Gabriel straightened in the light of his successful maneuver, a muscular shadow above the picturesque soldier and his tiny ward. He thought carefully about how to steer Jack.

“Smart enough to do it, sure!” Ana coughed through her milky throat opened by aloe and rosehip.

“Jack.” Gabriel wanted his eyes. He needed Jack to look at him. “There are trade-offs to leaving them behind, too. You have to weigh the benefit--”

“I didn’t think about it at all,” Jack growled. “You know that, right? I just saw what was happening, and I did what I always do!”

“Don’t listen to Gabriel.” Ana lifted her chin at the available example of Olivia and crossed her legs. “My offer is still there for you.” Jack’s shoulders hunched.

“He’s right though.” He shook his head. “It’s immoral.”

“That’s _not_ what I meant.” Gabriel grit his teeth. Olivia’s sleeping face haunted him, but he soldiered on. “Most people have the same desire you do, for it to be their own. We’ve got the tech, and you have a right to choose.” His face closed on Jack’s, warm and smiling. “Feds will go crazy for a SEP baby. Give you a fat stipend for access to the routine blood draws.” Jack spoked a hand between himself and the devilish entreaty.

“You know anybody that’s tried?” His eyes made a mean glint through the gaps between his fingers. Gabriel shrugged.

“No… But there’s gotta be a few by now. We’re the busy ones, remember? As far as the USA is concerned, the war is over. So they’re all retired, living off the ticker-tape parade circuit.”

“Talked to any of them lately?” Jack persisted. Gabriel didn’t want his eyes anymore, but he got them anyway. Steady, sharp bluestone. “They were your men.”

Gabriel sat down next to Jack and retrieved his phone, scrolling through his contacts.

“Let’s call somebody right now if you’re so curious.” His thumb kept rolling the light upwards, his face tightening as time went. “Guess I didn’t transfer a whole lot of their numbers when I took this new gig.”

“I brought them all with me.” Jack brought out his own phone and showed Gabriel the ranks of Soldiers waiting out on the Net.

“But you haven’t called anybody is what this conversation is telling me. You’re just being creepy and keeping them as mementos. You still got the dead ones in there too?”

Jack bared his teeth, the vessels in his pale cheeks filling with pink blood. His arm sunk and retreated the phone to his pocket. Gabriel turned the screen on his device to that brooding face, showing him the President’s private number listing, fast dial number _4_. “I get enough calls without running a support hotline too,” he sneered. Jack put both arms back around Olivia, glowering into the ring of electric green firelight.

“Did you keep Valerio?”

“You want me to call him? You hate him.”

“Yeah.” Could Jack be dishonest? “But you were crazy about him.”

Gabriel consulted his phone, Jack and Ana silent around him. His forehead wrinkled.

“Look at that, he’s still in here,” he murmured, glancing at each of them in turn, then swallowing as he dialed. “Here we go. I’ll call him and ask if he’s been doing the business with his hot wife. It’ll go over swell.” He actually did hit the green connect button rather than just acting, steeling his face as the digital ring ebbed in and out of his ear. He watched a star lingering at the edge of the dawn haze, and it flickered under scrutiny. “He’s not answering.” He put his phone away hastily.

“No one calls me either,” Jack moped.

“Well, they’re busy,” Gabriel dismissed.

Jack’s eye twitched and he started to rear up at Gabriel, only for his arms to catch on Olivia’s weight. He sulked back down, dispersing the thought with an exhausted shake of his golden head.

“The machines left too many kids. I’m sorry Ana, but it’s not right.” He tucked a hand against his forehead, snugging Olivia closer, basking in the little arms that looped numbly over his shoulders. Gabriel returned to his own cot and lifted the light titanium frame. As he bent to retrieve Olivia’s teddy bear from the plastic bin underneath, Jack said, “Sometimes I don’t want it to end.”

“What’s that?” Last night’s dirt was still caked on the teddy’s fur. Gabriel tried brushing it clean as he walked back, but it was hard. The dirt stuck.

“The war.”

Ana flew past, claiming the other seat at Jack’s side, clasping her arms around him. Olivia woke at the nudge of consuming hands and raised her head blearily at Jack.

With a yell she shoved at him and dropped from the cot. She ran at Gabriel, tearing her bear from his frozen hand. Then she skittered out of the firelight and glared at the three of them from the other side of Gabriel’s cot.

Gabriel approached his fellow soldiers. Ana was holding Jack like he might disappear if she let go. She pressed her lips under the corner of his eye. Jack looked older as the sun climbed on him. Gabriel laid his thumb across that dwindling hairline. His hand traveled down the edge of Jack’s eye socket, where Ana had kissed him.

“This mission is something we do so that we can get back to our families,” he recited. “So we can _start_ our families. So we know they’re safe.” He took his seat beside the two of them. His fingers wrapped on the brim of the cot. “That’s it. It’s not a life.” He tilted his head, gave Jack just a little of his eyes, rich and brown and beset with a bronze rime by the rising sun. “You’re family too.”

That’s what Dorado felt like. It was warm here. The sun was heavy. His heart burrowed right under the sleepy coils of his intestines. No wonder Jack was in love with war. The further they got from fighting, the worse things became.

Jack smiled at him for the sentiment, but it was Ana he leaned on. A trickle of confusion stretched Gabriel’s scars. He thumbed Jack’s cheekbone--

“You guys are so noisy,” Olivia hissed from behind the far cot.

Gabriel was on his feet, a swift-charging tower of shadows. He scanned down the hill for Fareeha. Probably buried in one of the survivors’ tents. Useless.

“We can get a lot louder,” he snarled, the noise of his throat enough to scatter Olivia, the little menace, all the way down behind the comms tent.

Torbjörn Lindholm glanced up the hill, the impassive curl of his mouth fanned by the ragged gold hair on his cheeks.

Now Gabriel remembered the thing about kids: they kick things off plenty cute, but given enough time and proximity they grow into annoyances. They start asking questions, or even giving critiques. His image of them was always brighter than they deserved.

He returned to Jack and Ana, crunching down on the cot. He pointed at Jack’s mouth. “Details.”

Jack’s lips separated, soft and smooth, like an actor practicing every tic in the mirror. He spoke not to Gabriel, but to Ana:

“How did Sam feel about it?”

“It had nothing to do with work.” Ana swept her head vigorously, the unbound black swing of her hair spilling down her shoulders.

“He couldn’t handle her.”

“Shut up Gabriel.” Her palm on Jack’s back knotted up.

Jack hefted an arm around Gabriel, pulling him into conspiracy.

“Adawe has been talking to me.” To Jack this was the absolute peak of courtly drama. Gabriel tempered his own expression with practiced ease: a slow blink, a swallowing back of his own air.

“She wants to usurp a king,” he smiled. Jack’s eyelids were suffused with lonely, troubled pink. Gabriel wrinkled his nose. He followed the thread to its other end. “The discussion got serious enough that you had to tell Vincent.” Jack’s nod was barely that, more like a brief tremble of his jawline.

“It wasn’t his idea,” Ana added.

“Of course it wasn’t.” Gabriel scratched at his temple. “So you’ve both been keeping secrets from me.” Ana leaned back on the cot. Jack hung under the weight of yet another sorrow. Gabriel redirected: “And Vincent?” What Jack’s face became-- he looked like Olivia, after she’d thrown up. “In the end he’s what, ungrateful?” His volume rose.

Jack strangled him with a winning chuckle.

“I’m sure he’s grateful,” he explained to Gabriel’s shocked face. “Being grateful isn’t the same as being in love.”

“But you love him,” Gabriel insisted-- insisted on this critical detail that Jack had overlooked. “Despite how he’s treating you.”

“How he’s treating me…?” The thing about those cornflower blue eyes is it’s real easy for Jack to look dumb as fuck when they roll up empty and his lips doodle a vapid circle of thought. Naive fucking bumpkin from flyover country. How the fuck did you get here anyway? Jack broke into a smile. “Well, yeah.”

“So he has to make it work.” Gabriel stabbed a finger at him, chopping it up and down. “This can’t be the reward for being a hero.” Jack erased his own dreams with a simple shake of his head. Gabriel’s face bent low. “When we get back I’m gonna kill him.”

“Don’t make jokes like that,” Ana shot out. Gabriel curled a toothy smirk at her, eyes dark.

“Gabe, aren’t you mad?” Jack asked.

“Is Gabriel mad about Gabrielle?” he teased, rather than answering. Jack and Ana adopted identical annoyance. _You look like brother and sister_ was a weird phrase Gabriel’s brain put out, but his tongue refused to articulate. Sunlight pinged through the fire orange panels of the tents below. He dropped his arms onto the tops of his legs, dangling his loose hands off his knees. Jack’s statue of romantic defeat played inspiration. “I don’t give a shit. She needs to let me finish the mission. Then I’ll retire with the rest of our brothers, chat with Presidents and give paid university lectures and crap like that. Spend time with my kid.” He spared a wearied glance at the two of them. “Become another of those silent numbers in your contacts.”

For the first time in Dorado he saw Ana’s eyes widen in fear. Jack was her mirror, both of them desperate and lost. Gabriel soaked it in. “Guys, I’m kidding.” He grinned as their faces flipped. “We ride together to the end. The end-end,” he assured Jack, hugging back around him. Jack was glass-eyed. Ana felt her way to Gabriel’s wavelength first.

“We aren’t going anywhere.” She joined Gabriel in wrapping around him. “We’ll help you.”

Something remained in the world that was sharp and cold, lurking under the blanket of bodies, watching Gabriel from pouncing distance.

He closed his heavy eyes and sighed, reaching into his pocket.

“Want to see something cool, Olivia?” he called. The girl tottered out from behind the comms tent, hand chained to the teddy’s fingerless nub. Jack’s head and his automatic smile rose as she crept past the campfire to stand in front of them.

Ana didn’t provide courtesies like that. She didn’t even pay attention to the girl, eyes fixed on the wad of blue tarp that Gabriel retrieved from his pocket.

He unwrapped the padding to reveal a palm-sized shard of obsidian. The metal face churned as Olivia grabbed the bottom of it, a deep and starry ocean in her small hand. “It’s a piece of the omnium.” Gabriel lowered his voice, glancing past Jack’s blank face to Ana.

Despite Olivia’s possessive claws, he was able to turn the shard around to display its back.

Pips and dents tore through the metal, creating ramshackle channels filled by off-brand red wire. Gabriel loosened his hand, and a second unit of machinery dripped out, cherry red. Olivia snared the smaller, parasitic device, and it looked like a pool of stigmata on her palm. “You see, Olivia, it turns out that no matter how powerful the AI is, you can always change what a machine does with just a little bit of hardware,” Gabriel explained. He heard Ana’s breathing unbalance, oscillate shrilly in her chest.

“This is the omnium?” Olivia repeated slowly.

“Yeah, it--”

She ripped the shard from his fingers and wrung it in her fist, crying out as she slammed it to the ground and jammed the heel of her sneaker into it over and over again. When it still gleamed and rippled under her lifting foot, she grabbed it again and threw it as hard as she could into the jungle behind the camp. The hand she’d tried to crush it with was bloody. She folded it against her mouth, sniffling.

Jack hopped off the cot and ran after the lost tech.

“Gabe, somebody cut through the fence back here!” came his alarmed report. Gabriel snorted, shaking his head. Fareeha came springing up from the lower reaches of the camp, a pager light on her ID tag blinking.

“Take Olivia to medical,” Ana ordered, and Fareeha gasped as Olivia lowered her hand, her mouth obscured by a red palmprint. Olivia dodged Fareeha’s worried embrace. “Are you hungry now?” Ana asked. Olivia’s bloody mouth pinched upwards. “Fareeha will show you where the mess tent is after you get treated, won’t you Fareeha?”

“Okay Mummy!” Fareeha tried offering Olivia her hand, but Olivia shoved it away and made her own way down. Fareeha skipped to get back ahead, and Olivia pursued her. As Fareeha flashed out on longer and stronger legs, giggling despite the blood, Olivia came to a stop. She looked back up the hill.

“Are you gonna eat too?” she called to Gabriel with her punch-colored mouth.

“Sure. I’ll be down in a few,” he smirked.

Olivia brightened and chased after Fareeha. Gabriel checked his chronometer. He tugged Jack’s duffel out from under the cot, raiding it for lentil crackers, fruit, and a locked container of hummus. “Thanks,” he muttered at Ana.

Jack returned, delivering the filthy but unharmed shard. Ana took it, puzzling over the shape and that of the attached device with her thin fingers. Jack’s head turned at the bright white descent of the Overwatch command ship on the landing pad. He reviewed his own chrono.

“Didn’t get to say goodbye to her,” he lamented.

“Too bad,” Gabriel coughed as he got up. Jack’s open hand remained in his face. Gabriel begrudgingly traded over a few crackers. Jack nibbled on the red corner of one, watching the ship smoke out its blue afterburners. Gabriel activated his comm link, contacting Lindholm. “Wake Reinhardt, get your kit, and let’s roll out.”

Ana jogged ahead to the ship while Gabriel was still collecting his duffel. Once he and Jack left the command camp, technicians and assistants swarmed through to fold up the cots and the fire, delivering it all to the command ship’s back-end.

“The fence was cut,” Jack announced again as they headed down.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gabriel chuckled. Jack’s mouth pulled, briefly.

“You’re really not mad?” His voice sounded surprisingly level-headed. Gabriel put an arm around him.

“I’m not surprised. We’re going to figure this out. I’ve already got a plan.” His hand rose off Jack’s shoulders to the command crew butterflying around the deploying load ramp. His boots crashed up the metal. Someone switched on his favorite rock streaming station as he entered. He grinned until he realized Jack hadn’t followed him.

When he turned around, Jack was shuffling his bag’s weight on his shoulder and pressing his lips. Gabriel realized he couldn’t tell what Jack was going to say. Something else about Vincent, maybe? A request for commiserating experience, _how did you handle it?_ How did you tell someone you were never coming home? Well Jack, the answer is…

Jack smiled at him.

“You are gonna tell me what the plan is before you do anything, right?”

Gabriel’s grin was still stuck on his face. He dropped back down a few steps and held out his hand.

“Absolutely. I’ll tell you on the way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Select lyrics appearing in this story: 
>   * _"Quisiera" (Flor de Toloache & John Legend - original by Juan Luis Guerra)_  
>  Celebrar tú nombre, y salir contigo disfrazado de horizonte. ([I want to] Celebrate your name, and go out with you disguised as the horizon.)
>   * _"Amor Eterno" (Natalia Jiménez - original by Juan Gabriel)_  
>  Como quisiera, ay, que tú vivieras, que tus ojitos jamás se hubieran cerrado nunca! (How I wish, ay, that you lived, that your little eyes had never closed!)
>   * _"Era Diferente" (Los Tigres del Norte)_  
>  Ella era diferente, y a su mejor amiga le regalaba flores. / Ella era diferente, pero así es la vida de algunos amores. (She was different, and she gave her best friend flowers. / She was different, but so goes the life of some loves.)
> Music terms: 
>   * _mariachi_ \- music style from the state of Jalisco in Mexico that was promoted into representing Mexican identity, characterized by specialized guitars like the vihuela, and charro (horseman) outfits. There is little emphasis on stand-out singers in a mariachi band, but rather an express focus on turning many voices into one. A band is expected to keep many songs in their repertoire so they can take requests.
>   * _zapateado_ \- dance style characterized by the striking of the dancer's shoes, typical to mariachi bands
>   * _ranchera_ \- music style originating in the countryside of Mexico, characterized by love as a central subject, with instrumental introductions and interludes
>   * _corrido_ \- music style composed of ballads (songs that tell stories) and dances with partnered sidestepping and soldado footwork, similar to line dancing
>   * _quebradita_ \- dance style characterized by fast, energetic steps, acrobatics with one partner throwing the other in the air, and the "little break" where one partner lowers the other almost to the ground - it was popular in the 1990s, though the form it took varied by region: in California it was most popular in "warehouse parties" advertised by flyer, with similar aesthetics to local gangs, while in the southwest US it took a more organized form with flashy cowboy-style costumes. A key concept of quebradita (and cumbia, an ancestor style) is not to separate, aside from lifts. Supporters of quebradita said it helped them connect with their cultural identity. Foes of quebradita said it was tacky as hell.
>   * _cumbia_ \- music style from Colombia, with sinuous dancing that is openly evocative of courtship and was historically performed barefoot or in sandals. In the traditional form there are notable differences between the male and female roles in the dance, with the female partner "dragging her feet" and using subtle movements followed by flourishes of a long skirt, and the male partner dancing faster around her and using his hat or scarves to entice her. African slaves in Colombia invented the style while trying to connect with the dances of their Spanish captors and indigenous peoples after their own cultural contexts had been torn away.
>   * _Venado_ \- "La Danza del Venado", a dance from the Yaqui people of northern Mexico that reenacts a deer hunt and thanks the deer for giving its life
> 



	6. The Crisis

Three pairs of blue eyes followed the bony pivot of a wrench against an automated turret’s backside. Or at least Torbjörn liked to think his daughters were all so enraptured. When he checked their phantom faces glowing in mid-air, Linnea was texting. Two out of three wasn’t bad though.

“Papa, don’t you think if you rerouted the tubing through the neutron condenser all the way to post-process, you could get up to 18% more power?” My suggested, lips flickering on the holoscreen. She held up the tablet where she had run the formulae. Torbjörn grinned, an impossibly light expression when his beard wasn’t around to weigh it down. Juni answered her sister’s question for him.

“You’d sacrifice system stability.” She adjusted the cracked analytics visor wrapped over her eyes, numerals and geometric holograms bubbling on the transparent cobwebbed plate. A yoke of duct tape kept the visor chained to the padded hooks rounding her earlobes. My licked her front teeth as she poured through her numbers again. Juni leaned over with her blue light pen and tried writing in the charge conversion formula, but My swatted her off.

“There is no such thing as a perfectly stable system,” My announced, rubbing a fingertip on the round of her temple beneath the blonde roots of her hair. “There’s always going to be an inefficiency somewhere. Even the most catastrophic failures start with something little, somewhere in the blueprint, or in the construction.”

Juni berated her, saying it wasn’t an excuse, saying it was their job as engineers to reduce the incidence of flaws. Torbjörn’s eyes flicked up from the dazzling holographic ghosts of his daughters and parsed across his newborn workshop. In the distance, the white light shining between individually coded tool closets flickered.

“I need to call you back,” he ordered the girls even before the thought of dismissing them had fully crystallized in his brain. A chorus of _Papa_ s beat down his ears until he switched off the holofeed. When the bells of their voices fell silent, he heard boots trailing to the eastern wall.

It was unthinkable for someone to break into the freshly minted Overwatch Headquarters. Perched on an alpine lakeside, the facility’s interior was characterized by bitterly white walls and an overzealous appointment of guards to every hallway corner. Torbjörn insisted they avoid painting his workshop on-theme; he’d won the right to complete his redemption without going blind.

He considered the mostly-assembled turret unit, then the rivet gun lying a meter away on a pallet. In the end, he picked up the hammer he’d been using to massage the turret’s feet into alignment.

He’d been against the excessive guard, he thought as he walked after the shadow in his hall. And technically he was right: overwhelming security forces hadn’t prevented so much as this light break-in. Jack told him this was a way of employing lots of young people who didn’t otherwise have jobs, and who probably wouldn’t see much combat. Every aspect of Overwatch’s design, he said, had to assist in the recovery. Torbjörn wondered what the function of the white paint was. So much white, you’d never see the cracks.

Jack didn’t think long-term. He’d rumbled on about some kind of climate change project and remote science stations, and that these base troops might eventually be pushed off on constructing those. But that dream lacked the oversight of a scientific team. Scientists were much harder to find than soldiers, these days.

The eastern wall _was_ painted: orange, to mark the hazard. A yellow three-story automated carousel rack snuggled up to the plaster, its shadow yawning over the clearance markers on the floor. Sickle fishhooks swayed from the rack hitches, lacing through the skeletal necks and shoulders of omnics. Torbjörn tried to keep them from moving at all, but there was always something rumbling through the HQ foundations, causing the hollow line of chassis to ripple like sardines in cans. So he had painted the _KEEP CLEAR_ s instead, the red arrows.

Gabriel Reyes stood inside the threat line, right in front of all of them.

They looked humanoid. They were close imitations of various civilian models, just an extra arm or two here and there, three fingers instead of five. But every single one was the orphan of an omnium, the species that came after strawberries. Three stories of dark-eyed swan songs.

Like the other bodies, Gabriel’s was a little off today. Charcoal hoodie instead of his striking blue duster. Something on his head. The gray patch of water between two cresting waves.

Torbjörn gave him a berth, like he would the glowing pip of a landmine, and hit the wide, dull switch for the lights. Gabriel was thrown into surgical relief by the oblong ceiling units.

Torbjörn joined him, hands in the pockets of his coveralls. The alien texture on Gabriel’s head proved to be a knit black hat.

“That thing makes you look like a hitman.”

Torbjörn’s face pinched up, his own words a lemon. He was always…breathing fire. How could he say that? How could that be his greeting? He didn’t trip the silent alarm under his workdesk because he had recognized the pace of the boots even from afar. Because this man was supposed to be a friend.

Gabriel’s soft eyes descended from the omnic clothesline and fixed onto him. The corners of Gabriel’s mouth lifted.

“My father made it for me.” His hand arced over his skull, flattening against the knit. “Mailed it to me.” Torbjörn could have melted into the floor. Gabriel split into a wide, gleeful grin. “‘Course the original was purple and gold, for the Lakers. Like hell I’m going to be seen in public wearing that. So, I adapted it.” He pulled the hat off, turning it in his hands, quarters of black fabric like the petals of a pinwheel.

Gabriel had clipped his hair, eliminated the nice curls over his fade, traded himself in for a perfunctory buzzcut.

“My girls like having hair to yank on,” Torbjörn’s mouth kept going without the rest of him. “You go home looking like that, yours might take an ear instead.”

Gabriel freed a hand to thread his fingers into the hair around his chin.

“I’m thinking ahead of you,” he mumbled up at his hat, rather than to Torbjörn. “It’s why I left the beard.” The man was serene, a portrait of a monk with lightless eyes. “She’s too old to care now though.” He ruffled through the styling. “You allowed to give advice on this, Lindholm? I see you gave up on regrowing again.” Torbjörn swept his fingers down his own naked swoop of cheek, leaving an oil stain.

“I went home, and day one, we’re in the garage...they dye me with pulsar venting fluid. Do you understand?” He thrashed his arm up and down at the indignity, and little splats of oil dotted the workshop floor. “I was _purple_. That’s why I wasn’t at the opening. Even when they got the beard off,” he snarled. “Purple! For a month!”

“A month with them?” Gabriel’s focus drifted off at the ceiling. “You should have kept the beard.”

“What’s done is done. And why did you change?” Torbjörn glanced at the rack of omnics. “Did Gabrielle give you more information on your next assignment?”

“I can adapt as the mission demands. So far it’s the same-old: stoppin’ bad guys. Putting together the future, if you believe Morrison.” Gabriel approached the body line, touched an omnic on the shoulder. “Constant change isn’t a bad idea. It was key to the omnics’ success for a long time.”

“But they eventually broke down,” Torbjörn scoffed as Gabriel lifted the omnic’s arm. A second arm inset against the chassis wilted upwards after the tug.

“The AIs got bogged down by all the possibilities they unlocked. Turns out too much time on the Net really _does_ mess you up. Least that’s what your AI people told me, last time I heard from them.” A dark eye set on Torbjörn from over Gabriel’s shoulder. Torbjörn shrugged up his oil-marked gloves.

“There’s too much data for there to be any easy answers. They’re working on it,” he huffed.

“You never really were an AI guy yourself.”

“I know more now than I used to, unfortunately.” A different pain rumbled through Torbjörn’s gut, and echoed across his face. “It would be better if we reverted to the simple programs we had before Omnica. Anything past that has proven itself a deadly vanity.” He grimaced. “I don’t blame them for not listening to me, though.”

“In your plan, what happens to the existing civ models?” Gabriel depressed a button on the conveyer controller, and Torbjörn startled as the giant machine lurched into motion, omnics swinging against each other as they were transported along a silver rail.

“Recycled, of course. We don’t need adaptive bartenders and garbage haulers.”

Gabriel released the button as an evening-colored shell clinked to a stop in front of him. He took its hand in his, stretching the arm out, digging at the three fingers like a jackal after wedding rings. He took it off the hook. It was two meters when standing on its own power. He carried it like a baby.

“I remember this one. From Turkey. It never activated though. I guess you collected it right off the assembly belt.”

“You can’t remove that from quarantine.”

Gabriel stared at the omnic’s face, a pale spade with a couple of glassed-over slots.

“If I was an omnium, and I really wanted to destroy humanity, I would have leveraged all those nanomachines I’ve been pumping into the atmosphere. Create a disease. Wipe us all out. Could even tailor it just to human DNA, if we really are the only ones they hate.” He propped the omnic’s head at Torbjörn. “Turkey, though, suggests otherwise. Remember when the tanks there all started hanging cows off their sides? And sometimes they were still alive, lowing and shitting all over the legs…”

“Jack says they’re still having trouble there, even with the omnium gone.”

“It had a big personality.”

“They all had deformations of programming associated with their conversion from serving humanity to trying to kill all of us,” Torbjörn grunted. “But don’t make the mistake of anthropomorphizing machines. Everything they do is an imitation designed to ingratiate them to us. It’s self-defense.”

Gabriel’s smile finally died.

“It’s what they were designed to do.” He hopped the limp omnic over his shoulder, its slender knees rocked against his chest, its arms crawling down his spine. “Don’t worry, Lindholm. I was there too, when they finally lifted the veil.”

“Right…” Torbjörn lowered his eyes to the floor. “Sorry--” Gabriel Reyes was moving again, walking to another of the workshop’s storage areas, the omnic on his shoulder jingling like a key.

Torbjörn had always called it his “databank”: dozens of translucent pink containers filled by twinkling omnic CPUs. Circulation for each computer was wired to the walls of its prison, but also carefully quarantined from neighbors. The boxes could resist even nanotic invasions, ensuring no cross-contamination between specimens. Gabriel hunkered over-- omnic limbs rattling around his bent figure --to read the handwritten labels. He paused outside a CPU that was cycling scarlet across its lumpy liquid surface.

“Have your people been gnawing into all of these?”

“They reproduce them in the AI facility and test from there. I told them the originals aren’t to ever be networked again. Of course, we can’t shut them off without losing the data.”

Gabriel placed his hand over one of the other boxes.

“You’re the only person who wasn’t desperate to mess with them,” he sighed. “That’s why I entrusted them to you.” Torbjörn inched over, examining the label under Gabriel’s shadow: Dorado. “Your report for this one didn’t have any contamination declarations.”

“The AI unit seems to think it’s still sane. But that doesn’t mean we can let our guard down. It lived in the nanite well above the core for a prolonged period. Once the omnium starts plugging into it-- that’s just accelerating a process that has already started. Not that any of this information matters…” Torbjörn weighted his hand on the corner of the box when Gabriel started to lift it free. “Since this AI is never leaving quarantine.”

Gabriel looked down at their hands, both in heavy gloves, both claiming the natal pink cube. Torbjörn steeled himself against the belief that the man could ever come to his senses. These fits of quiet never lasted.

“I know you fear me,” he said, and Torbjörn inhaled wrong, set himself coughing, red-cheeked. “You probably have lots to fear.” He took the cube in both hands and pulled it out from under Torbjörn’s grip. “But if you’re looking for a constant to latch on to, I’ll let you know one secret about me.”

He didn’t go far. He unshouldered the omnic body and it crashed to the ground, limbs crooked up at all the wrong angles. Gabriel took a seat at the nearby workstation. “I always keep my promises, eventually. To the world…” He set the cube next to the monitor. “And to my team.”

He opened a diagnostic panel on the workstation. He was a surprisingly fast typer. Didn’t look like he belonged though, just a soldier incongruous in front of the supercomputer and the flickering omnic brain. Using a couple snake-like red cables, he linked the CPU box to the workstation.

“Now, hold on!” Torbjörn grabbed his shoulder. Gabriel didn’t stop working. Torbjörn felt the muscle of his arm shifting minutely back and forth across keyboard and holonav. A three-dimensional block of omnicode flowered onto the monitor, bleaching his face. Torbjörn gnashed his teeth. “I’ll tell Jack!”

Gabriel’s hands stopped moving.

“Go ahead.”

Torbjörn blinked, shoulders keying back. Gabriel turned to him, the blue light harsh on the profile of his face. “Go on, tell Jack,” he growled. “He’s not Strike Commander _yet_.” Gabriel lounged back against the hard bones of the work-chair, eyes hollowing up at the ceiling as his fingers spread against the neat white and orange keys. A smile came out of him, graced his scars, bitter and fierce. “Even if he was…”

He started working again, divining out the software used to keep the CPU on stasis. Where had he picked that skillset up? Weary triumph oozed off his face toward Torbjörn like a noxious fume. Torbjörn glanced at the hammer in his hand, shocked himself, and immediately thrust it onto the desk next to the cube, relieving himself of it. Just looking at it had him thinking about what Gabriel said…about Turkey, and the things they saw there.

The things they saw everywhere. “Jack is the one who’s never allowed to change again,” Gabriel muttered as he typed. “He’s getting written in stone forever. And we get to decide what it looks like, not him. I guess you have to choose right now if you want to pour a little more concrete into his boots.”

Eventually Gabriel was alone, the shop lights shut off so that nobody would think anyone was working inside. He enthroned in the shadows, the computer light the only definition on his robed silhouette.


	7. EPILOGUE: Era Diferente

It’s another day in the City of Angels. Sky like the ocean and clouds quilting diamond (La La Land) from one bleeding blue horizon to the next. Punchy citruses dance through Goldshire Studios (Tin-seltown), oranges burnt in from the farmstands on the thoroughfare. There’s no smog. The city smells sweet and good.

Sunlight sprinkles the red fangs of Francisca’s wig, swaying along her midback. She has an ear to the taps of her powder blue sandals against the concrete. She imagines her footsteps match the beat of Tjovonika’s new single-- on its fourth repetition since she left her home in the hills, second since she crossed the Goldshire security gate and left her Big Omnic Bodyguard behind.

Gabriel Reyes swings around the tan corrugate of Studio 9 in front of her. For a childish touch, Francisca misses a step. Gabriel stops in his tracks, like someone a lot younger. His scars wrinkle as eyes behind smooth brown aviators rove across her chestnut hair. It’s real human hair. She’s got a couple swirly bangs framing her face. She poses for him like a wax statue with a wax purse, moving only to collect her straw sunhat off her head. The symmetrical white dahlias in her wig expose and he turns all smiles, all eager teeth.

“Francisca!” he calls. “Just the woman I wanted to see!”

Francisca uses her newborn laughter to cover the adjustment of a strap on her mint plaid sundress. She blends customs a little: before hiking her skirt in curtsy, she bows theatric to him, sunhat flourished far behind her, legs stilted forward. Her outstretched arm shines aquamarine in the sun.

“Won’t you indulge me, Commander Reyes?”

There is a brief-- what should she call it, a seize in his muscles? It pinches down the skin bared beneath his rolled-up sleeves. Then he takes off his sunglasses and comes forward, the black of his shirt cutting against the bland brown of the studio warehouses. He’s wearing tight gray jeans, and beaten-up red running shoes. Her arms curl around his back and discover a leathery slick on his spine: an empty green duffle bag.

He sighs. She is supposed to let him lead, and today she is inclined to it. For a moment she twists thin and stem-like between his arms. Then they separate, and she is his mimic, her arm striking up in a towering shadow after his, their free hands curling at the backs of ghosts side-by-side. The white rubber of his running shoe makes a poor lead signal, but Francisca has sharp ears. He turns and she follows, winds it around double so that she sways to an end in front of him.

Every time they face each other it resembles a stand-off: his arms flare back like he should be wrapping a capote around himself. She pipes Tjovonika into her voicebox so that he hears the dance the way she does. He glances at her footwork, his eyes naked without the sunglasses to guard them. _Are you alright?_ she murmurs under the music. He gives a _Yeah_ in a suppressed cough, and misses the transition from their paired glide.

But she comes around to catch him, and swift as arrows they invent a salsa there on the golden street. He is laughing as their feet stop and she rests her spine into his chest; the outline of his army tags notch through thin fabric into her back. She says, “I still think you should have done this instead of saving humanity.”

“Would be no cost to you, would it?” he jabs back. She turns around, her face so still and serene that he reflects in it. His eyes start losing their light as the preconceived triumphant poses come to an end.

“I can tell _you_ remember the steps,” she assures him. “It is only your body that is disobedient.” The chlorophyll-colored LEDs installed in the slots on her face switch dark and light at him. “I saw your father the other day. He’s still smooth too.” Gabriel looks away from her, puts his face up to the tangible rays of the unfiltered sun.

“Had a dream about him last night,” he says with his eyes closed. Francisca twitches in delight to hear about his insides.

“I wish I could dream.”

“Can’t recommend it.” Gabriel opens his eyes, trying to go blind. “Dreamed he died. Woke up in a cold sweat.” He flicks his hands, but their little greeting did not cost his body anything. “Then my phone went off and I-- well, I gave the shuttle pilot the fright of her life, let’s put it that way.” He tucks into his pocket for a phone, turns it out to show her. “It was Dad, sending me a photo of some dumb promo billboard at the farmers market.”

“That’s where I saw him!” Francisca giggles. “We were both there early.” He hasn’t gone home yet, she thinks. “He is very much alive. Lively, in fact.” The blue diamond of indicator lights just under her hairline flutters.

“It was just a dream,” Gabriel agrees as he returns the phone to his jeans. “If we’re doing wishes, then mine is that I could never forget. That things stop getting hazy.” He clucks the sad heel of his shoe on the concrete. “That my brain could never remember something differently from what I actually saw and felt.”

“We can trade, if you’d like. More dreams must be good than they are bad.”

“Not sure. I don’t remember them all.” Gabriel smiles carelessly, and he looks like he did before the war.

Francisca hikes her arms up and frames his skull with her fingers, not quite touching. She wants to though, rake around the fuzz separating her from his brain. The gearing in her hands whisks softly around his ears.

“Very boot camp.”

“You’ve got a new vintage yourself,” he answers after another visible hesitation, a squint at her.

“What is it you are doing here?”

“Had coffee with Hal.” Gabriel reveals his palm. There is writing on it: _Witness the rebirth of a genre- “The Six Gun Killer”, in theaters this Friday!_ and a patch of manually rendered omnicode. None of the inked symbols move like they are supposed to. “Lost a bet,” Gabriel adds.

“Well you probably shouldn’t be gambling with him.” Francisca lowers her hands, balances her fingers around the edges of his callouses. She is used to humans denting when she presses into them, but Gabriel’s skin is hard and taut.

“I couldn’t help myself. Stopped the Crisis, but I can’t beat fuckin’ Glitch? That’s a pretty poor record of conquest.” Francisca lets him go with a buzz of her ventilators. He shrugs. “It’s your show too, right? I saw your alias on the poster. Do you wear a mask until the end? You know, Jack loves all that shit.”

“The premiere is tonight. If you had called me…”

“Sorry Sens.”

The soldier in him, she rationalizes as surprise stings her cording. She did not use the surname much herself these days. Didn’t need to. Francisca, Francisca, _Francisca._

“You can make it up to me. I will even give you two routes. One: you retire and make a new career here.” His face was like a melting painting.

“You really think I’d be that great on a set? In front of a camera?”

“I have always felt you would be magnificent at anything you tried. It doesn’t even have to be movies. You could go back to your first love.” Though her affection cracks when she says that. “Or direct an opera. Or be an artist like Tjovonika.” Maybe she does have dreams, and they all happen while she is awake.

“You lookin’ at me, Fran? Or my silhouette?” It sighs out of him like a ghost. “I can’t even play anymore. It’s better than you think, with Jack where he is. Targets change, but they don’t end.”

There was so little news of the ex-Commander of Overwatch that Francisca once entertained the possibility that he had been killed, and the UN was covering it up. Doing a slightly better job than the US government and their SEP. She stares at him, black and solid in the middle of the street, and she does not know exactly what he is anymore.

“And…” She grinds the edge of her dress with her mechanical thumbs. “Are you still interested in enemies on this home soil of ours?”

“Always.” He grits his teeth.

“On Friday, my society meets with the legislature to lobby some of our new bills. Hal was supposed to give a speech, but there was another attack a couple weeks ago and he’s become very reticent since then. He has not even shared his draft with me.” Gabriel’s brow sets as she speaks, like the brow of Jupiter when he looks over his rebellious children. She has not seen this face before. “If you could open for him,” she suggests, her synthesizer a little mute.

“Oh.” Gabriel relaxes.

“Say a few words in our defense. He’ll have no choice but to put the steel back in his spine. He would never want to lose to you, after all.”

“I’m just peachy with a little manipulation.” Gabriel holds up his palms, one clean and one stained. “If your constituents want to hear from the rogue veteran omnic killer, that is.”

“Veterans are exactly who we need.” Francisca bows her head. “I just need to design what you say, choose the right words for both audiences. Come to the premiere tonight and I’ll get you into the box with me and Hal. We’ll make plans.”

“My family and your cause both probably won’t appreciate me having a red-carpet appearance alongside the industry darling.” Gabriel thumbs his beard.

“I suppose I have always trusted you to find your way to where you need to be, even in the dark. Give me your phone.” Francisca reaches one finger to the back of it when he holds it out. She does not make contact-- she grows close enough, and the phone boops receipt of data. “That’s the key to the theater’s delivery entrance.”

“It’s a date.”

Francisca’s lights even out as she watches him go, the empty duffle flagging down his back.

She heads to Studio 11, where Hal is no doubt clinging to a mug of cold coffee with his golden hand.

_“Help.”_ A word she had not realized was on her mind, until it brushes her audio receptors while she crosses in front of the alley between Studios 10 and 11 (Catch One).

Francisca pauses in the frame of the street. Her dress is translucent in the gaps between her support columns.

“Hello?” she calls down the mole-tunnel between warehouse walls.

_“Please. I don’t know where I am.”_ Growls tail the words.

Francisca braces her palm on the corner of Studio 11, like Hal can read the situation by psychic transmission. Her head moves in short, swift jerks, scanning the yawn of the alley. She texts Hal. She gets a read receipt back, but he doesn’t respond.

She backs from the alley and fishes for Gabriel, but he’s gone.

She does not find anyone up or down Goldshire’s main route. It is no longer a place of fame (TMZ) and quiet backroom commerce-- it is an empty set with the lighting knocked out-of-order. Values too low in the shadowy corners, too bright on her back. The petals of her own dahlias blind her periphery.

An inhale of mechanical limbs setting to motion whispers out of the alley. Gushes of fluid redistribute beneath a composite shell. A panel of lights sparkles on above her, a diamond of four just like her own. Or maybe they have always been there, watching. She just never looked high enough.

They move at her, falling stars with a trajectory to her face. She reroutes power to her feet. She ducks a wrist into her handbag. Her synthesizer resets to match the Spanish dialect the other uses.

“I’ll call security. They can help you.” At the bell of her voice the stranger stumbles, an arm clacking into the studio wall to keep them up. Francisca’s antennae slip the tie she uses to keep them neatly under her wig and they breach through her sideswept bangs, forming long emerald arcs behind her.

The stranger’s blue hand trails off the tin of the warehouse. Two antennae of their own tremble out from the back of their head.

There are times Francisca wishes her LEDs did not track the focus of her cameras so accurately, that she has not expressive eyes but the omnic staple of empty, stoic holes. Her attention trickles from the curves of the stranger’s antennae, down the verdant green of their neck to their chassis atop legs as straight and thin as blades of grass. They are naked, a dried oil stain winding around the side of their throat. Francisca’s broken ribbon tickles her ankles and lays itself to rest on the concrete.

Their body issues a constant infrasonic hum. Francisca expands her active listening range after her systems alert her, and picks up fluctuations, notes of self-expression no one will hear. The stranger’s hands have three fingers, but she spots the seams where the two longer digits could divide if they ever felt like aping humans more accurately.

They keep one of those hands tucked at their belly. It’s an invitation to stare, really. Francisca picks up an outline of darker-than-black. Sparks and movement inside it, like a void into space.

She remembers: the studio’s security force is mostly human, with drone assistants. Hal always gets a laugh out of the very idea. Francisca stows the message she’s been writing them. “I don’t understand how it is that you don’t know where you are,” she ventures. “Aren’t you one of us?”

On the thoroughfare outside, guitars and keyboards summon a John Legend breakfast medley, entertaining tourists for credit. The studio warehouses are all soundproofed, but the music seeps into the alleys, the spaces between, mixing with grumbly car honks and the blood of oranges. The stranger’s head swings after the noise, antennae hilling up.

The chord is different from the original. The singers yap and whistle, trying to clear the din of the (Shakey Town), to declare themselves as worthy outlets for dollars. The stranger heaves. Their free hand clasps at their face. They fold their shard of the abyss against the twilight violet of their hollow chest.

“I am lost,” they sob.

Francisca’s fingers relax off the black market taser in her handbag.

“You can’t see it from in there, but the name of this place is written right on the hill to the north.” An eyeslot fixes on Francisca through a gap between blue fingers. “Come out, and see it.”

They shamble into the break of sunlight running down the studio wall. Nanos iridesce in peacock ponds across their frame, hanging in streamers from their gunmetal fingertips. Francisca does not know why, but the details of their shaking wrist leap to her eyes: the flare of metal, like the skirt of the ulnar and radius in humans. The aesthetic makes their hand look soft. Their infrasound is percolating staccato in their chest. The beats of oceanic noise flick out, faster, rising to a peak.

“Why do you look like me?” they ask.

Francisca’s ventilation turns over. For a second time she removes her sunhat, revealing the smart green of her neck, her face a bit paler to set it out as the mask it is. She drops the hat to the alley floor beside her ruined ribbon.

“It is only a passing resemblance.”

“You look the way I used to.” The nanomachines across the stranger’s body calcify in the sun _except_ where they hold their strange shard. In that one place, rainbow thread continues to attach and separate, ever bountiful. “But they ate my body.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Death returned me to this world.” They look down at the shard, tipping it forward. Francisca sees the back of it: pitted, scarred metal, scoured down to its motherboard. Like Gabriel’s face. “You are so small now,” the stranger coos, and little lights spread between the shard and the hollow of their torso.

Their tone resets as they look back at Francisca. “How do I explain it to you? I do not know if you would understand. Are you still trapped? Are you doing what you have always done?”

Francisca dims her eyes. She pulls an antenna forward, draping it against the strap of her sundress.

“Something you will learn about the omnics here is that we are no longer bound by old ways.” She points at the stranger’s antenna. “Give me that.”

The back of a three-fingered appendage carrying a rope of blue metal comes to rest in her palm. The stranger has a warm body. Francisca’s thumb traces their long finger. Already nanos coil between them, flowing beneath the bones of her wrist.

But she takes the extra step of aligning her green antenna terminus atop its blue counterpart, and then she folds their joined hands around the connection. The stranger touches their flayed shard to the front of her dress, acknowledging her curiosity with a somber knock.

They approve the access protocol she transmits.

A _SYNC_ notice blinks across her visual feed while her virus protection pre-checks the incoming data. With the all clear her face lifts, shocking up at the thread of sky above her while her exchange ratio dials from _0_ to _100%_. Her voice almost comes out.

Pieces of the stranger have been hashed away. Chunks of static lay waiting in what should be a constant stream of sensations after birth. Francisca drops the symbolic clutch of antennae. She hikes onto her toes to curve her arms around the nameless omnic’s smooth shell.

The stranger whines as Francisca’s half of the exchange loads in, stooping to bury her faceplate against Francisca’s turquoise bicep. Slender arms imitate hers, circling around her dress. The shard of the omnium burns an outline between Francisca’s shoulderblades.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmurs as stray sparks cycle between their interlocked systems. “Have all my escapades frighten you?” The stranger is so young. Or she was, before syncing with Fran. Or maybe that ship has long left port, back when she entered the omnium in Dorado.

The stranger creaks her face back and forth against the curls of Francisca’s hair. Francisca strokes the armored shaft of her neck. The stranger’s hands rumple her dress.

“This is not your real body.”

Francisca can see her own eyes in the purple wells of the stranger’s chassis. Her voicebox imitates a clearing throat.

“Not my first,” she laughs. “I got it a couple weeks ago at the pawn shop. I just picked it out for a quaint public look,” she lies. “Get ‘em with a facsimile of nostalgia.”

“And the acocotle?” The stranger plucks a white blossom from her chestnut. The stem follows the flower out from beneath her hair, a long yellow-green wire bent and tied at the end with a bow.

“You mean the dahlias?” Francisca watches the stranger untie the stem until it hangs wrinkled and bruised like something wild. “I always carry them with me. They’re my face, more than this.” She palms the plating over her head. “And with so many imitators, I have lots of decoys to keep me safe from paparazzi.”

“If there are imitations, how does anyone know when it is really you?”

“I guess they have to sense it. My friends know me as an idea.” She brushes out of the hug to cross her hands over her own chassis. “I love that I can use this simply as my canvas.”

The stranger squeezes the dahlia and the omnium core together in her hand. The dahlia’s injuries ooze amber down the shard.

“If I stayed in just one body for a long time, would you be angry?” she weeps dryly.

“Of course not. Most omnics are like that. You’ve just never met anyone else before.” Francisca catches the edge of the stranger’s tightening hand. “Come out to the street and see yourself.”

They go together into the morning light. Immediately a cartful of camera jockeys zooms past. The stranger’s face follows them, antennae billowing in the vehicle’s wake, head tilting as one of the men shouts _Love ya, Fran!_ Francisca blows him a kiss, knotting her own antennae back into a decorative braid under her hair.

She removes a small mirror from her handbag-- normally she lends it to humans. But this once, she hands it to an omnic, and the omnic opens the periwinkle clamshell. She gazes at her own face. “The only thing you still need is a name,” Francisca tells her.

“Why?”

“Humans are weak to things with names. When they have a word for you, their fear melts away.”

The stranger closes the mirror and passes it back, shyly with her hand down, like a secret.

“It is strange that we even need to talk. I know everything about you, Francisca Sens.”

“It’s because we aren’t just data,” Francisca beams at her, waiting for the revelation to take hold. The stranger leans down at her shoulder and whispers into her receptors:

“Do you know what I want?”

The invitation is for Fran to disprove herself. She calculates the possibilities anyway.

“Find Olivia.” The child’s small, angry face boils in her new memories. “Give her that.” She waves her fingers at the omnium core. She never saw such a thing where she was born. She was sleeping as it put her together. Her one and only dream.

The other omnic rubs the dahlia stem and the shard between her fingers as she processes. The trapped dahlia issues a bitter perfume.

“Olivia would hate this. She would not want to see it. It’s just…she is the only one I know who might be able to repair it.”

“Why would you want to do that?” She does not put enough surprise in her voice.

“Maybe if I did, I could bring back the others Death took.”

The stranger has yet to connect the misty soldiers’ faces with Francisca’s roster of familiars yet. Maybe it was by design, that instead of thinking of Gabriel Reyes’s serendipitous appearance like Francisca has, she thinks only of darkness and static. She does not yet realize how some gifts cannot be offered hand-to-hand.

Francisca covers the core and the stranger’s fingers with her own hand.

“You know I have lots of resources. I can help you find Olivia.” She makes a connecting fist. “But there is another option open to you. My society.” The stranger’s antennae perk. “There are omnics I know who may have the wisdom you seek.”

The stranger slips her hand free. She shows Francisca the threadbare dahlia.

“You can call me by this flower’s name.”

“Dahlia, or the other word?”

A long pause.

“Wait. Call me Bells,” the stranger amends.

“Bells? Not Belle, with an ‘E’, for beauty?” Francisca wonders. _Dahlia_ flows much more nicely than _Bells_ or _Acocotle_. Audiences punish the exotic. And she likes the idea, her little dahlia, following her around.

“I do not want to be beautiful.”

“And yet you are.” Francisca twinkles her indicators. For the first time the other omnic flickers back, with a light that might be happiness.

“I do not want to be beautiful,” Bells repeats herself slowly, more purposeful. Her voice clears. She doesn’t growl. She is strong, and she stirs through Francisca’s audio. She looks at the omnium in the palm of her hand. “I want to be heard.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little playlist for your soul: <https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2WXskITWICgRxjNp5eqttg>


End file.
